


Dark Retrospect, part 2: "Coward.  Any Day."

by jer832



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Culture, Angst, Angst and Humor, Existential Angst, F/M, Gallows Humor, Humor, Implied/Referenced Torture, Other, Romance, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-02-05
Packaged: 2018-01-08 12:41:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1132763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jer832/pseuds/jer832
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part 2 of 3.  Imprisonment and torture are the high point of the Doctor's and Jack's day, a temporary lull in the trio's self-torture. As they wait for Rose to rescue them, battered and barely able to breathe without coughing up blood they finally can begin to talk. Later, still wracked with guilt over what she'd let herself do to him, Rose asks the Doctor to take her home and the Doctor implodes. Jack plays his biggest, most dangerous con ever and finds himself facing the fury and savage strength of an out-of-control Time Lord.</p>
<p>The title of Part 2 is from Nine's dialog in R. T. Davies' "The Parting of the Ways".<br/><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1125145">PART 1</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "Converging Blood Splatters"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Doctor let his eyes meet Rose's briefly, a stolen taste not a final meal. He nodded. He knew better than to touch her._

 

 

 

Rose paused uneasily at the entrance to the control room, but her gaze continued in on autopilot, sweeping the floor around the console for a pair of legs clad in well-worn black-denim; found them, found a pair in just-off-the-shelf blues nearby. Both were long and muscular and downright gorgeous. Watching them fidget and flex as the Doctor and Jack worked under the console, Rose smiled appreciatively. Then she scowled. That sort of thinking was what had caused all the hurt and pain in the first place. “You’re nothin' but a cheap desperate slapper, Rose Tyler,” she whispered to herself, knowing it was what her mum would say. Rose suddenly missed her mum so much she couldn't keep the tears back.

The hums and buzzes of various sonic and more conventional tools were accompanied by muffled instructions, grunts, and an occasional curse in one language or another, the sounds that Rose had come to identify as the Doctor and Jack quietly, expertly, and lovingly at work on the TARDIS. She approached tentatively, not sure if they could see her, not really believing they'd even want her there. Neither acknowledged her presence so she sat on the jump seat and waited, going over and over what she needed to say before she left.

Them both being there would make it easier for her.

No, it made it harder.

No.

She heard them say something about Oz, but it didn't seem as if they were talking about the book. They sounded on edge, and her first thought was that something was wrong with the TARDIS. She paid closer attention for a couple of minutes… seriously and deliberately, just not like usual for the enjoyment of the two gorgeous time travellers' muscled legs and tight bums, and the sensual tones of their deliciously accented technobabble. Maybe her sense of them was heightened by knowing that she didn't fit into the picture anymore, that soon she'd be gone. Rose felt sure they weren't working together like they usually did. Usually it was as if they were physical extensions of the TARDIS - like the sentient time ship was sharing part of herself with them and telling them exactly what she needed, and they were sharing part of themselves with each other as they cherished her with their tools. The sounds of maintenance didn't have the usual smooth and knowing rhythm, their muffled voices sounded strained, and there were awkward pauses between them. The Doctor and Jack were uncomfortable together.

It was her fault of course. They were uncomfortable with each other because of what had happened– because of what _she_ had made happen. They had to talk to each other now, yeah, because they had to work together now. But they had no reason to have to talk to her now–she got that, yeah; she was bloody sick of hearing her herself, the apologies and regrets that did nothing but use up air.

Rose sighed and collapsed back into the chair, tired of being alone with herself, hating the tense and excluding silence, and dreading having to face them, especially the Doctor. She was exhausted and strung out, felt like rubbish and had the jitters and needed a cup of tea something fierce, but–

But she wouldn't, couldn't, go back into that kitchen! What if those sapphire things were still there, waiting for her? Waiting to go into her mind and eat more of her dreams and make them alive. Nothing had really scared her to her marrow since the Doctor had taken her hand and run with her; with him she'd always felt — not safe, exactly, not with what he ran them into, but within the security of his strength and caring. But she was terrified of the star sapphires, she was sick with fear that they'd find something inside her even worse than before, and she was scared to the marrow that she'd use it against the Doctor again, or Jack.

**~**

The Doctor had known the moment Rose appeared at the door. He'd felt her hesitating, counted the one hundred thirteen seconds it took her to call up her Tyler steel and grit, counted her advance into the room in seconds anxiously drawn out and uncertain steps to the jump seat. He'd done that to her, he'd turned the place she'd been most at home into someplace she had to force herself to go into. "What is it then, Rose,” he asked quietly, in a momentary lull in their repairs.

Although the Doctor's voice was just barely audible, Rose jumped almost out of her skin… almost out the door and back to the punishing safety of her rooms. She stuttered some kind of incoherent answer. She was saved by Jack. (Jack always saved her if the Doctor couldn't, didn't he.)

"Doc, we need a new cross-keyed pulse timer circuit between nav and the jump pilot processor."

"Thanks, Captain." A huge gulp of air, such guilty relief, saved him from having to talk to Rose; his need for concentration would buy Rose's silence. Wanting silence– now there was another good joke on him!

The circuit Harkness asked for was in a loose heap of parts and wires and whatnot on the floor beyond the console. He swivelled around under the console and reached blindly for the circuit. His hand found the pile, felt around; but the circuit lay beyond his grasp. He stretched out from under the console, grunting a bit as his shoulder and arm muscles strained and something popped. She was watching him; he felt it. "Can it wait, Rose," he said tightly, watching his hand creep along the floor toward the pile, "'cos Jack and I really haveta–"

The Doctor's words were cut off as the TARDIS stumbled and bucked. His body pitched out. He rolled over the flooring until he hit a support, staggered up and launched himself to the console. Rose wrapped her arms and legs around the jump seat and held tight.

"What did I _do_?" Jack yelled, sounding almost frantic.

"Nothing, it wasn't you!" In an instant Jack was out from under the console, next to him, balancing on the balls of his feet as the ship struggled around them. As he called out technical questions, Jack fed him the data he needed for the delicate piloting adjustments. Their fingers danced over the controls, and their bodies around the console, and young Jack Harkness worked with him to finesse the TARDIS out of her strop as if they'd been doing that sort of thing together for years, until… “Jack, take her out of the vortex.”

“Shouldn't we finish repairs first, Doc?” Jack asked. "It'd be nice to think we have a better than even chance of hitting what we're aiming for."

The Doctor's fingers hurried over the secondary temporal interface displays. “She wants out of the vortex, Captain," he said, "Let’s find out why.”

Harkness looked at him and nodded. "I never say no to a lady."

The Doctor's fingers froze on the display. He gaped at the human, never expecting that patented smiling, seductive Jack Harkness wind-up after he'd made such a spectacular muck-up of things between them. "Do you ever say no to anyone?" he shot back, hiding behind the comfortable, safe old retort. He wanted to know if Harkness smiled. He didn't look.

They depressed buttons and pulled levers on the console, checked read-outs on a screen, landed the TARDIS, rechecked, and locked her down.

“Ok, Captain, we've landed. Let's go see what we're supposed to."

The Doctor had offered Jack that second chance to damn him; what he got back was another dimpled smile and some flippant cynicism: "You know how this is going to go, right Doc?" The Doctor started to present his manic grin then stopped himself. He rubbed the back of his neck and wondered if it was possible to pretence oneself into a regeneration. "Look, Jack," he breathed, "I really need to know if things between us… if you and I, if we–"

"I really need to know something too, Doctor," Jack snarled at the Time Lord, "but _I_ am not a mind reader. Now that we've taken a crippled TARDIS out of the vortex and landed her, are we going out there, whenever there is, and getting our asses handed to us–" Jack stopped dead with his mouth open. He looked stunned, as if he were trying to figure out who'd just said that. But then he grinned brightly at the Doctor, making sure to show off all of his dimples to their fullest, especially the killer one in his chin. "–'cause I drew the card that says I get forty-five minutes and Rosie's ass, and I want to make sure to get every last minute I can with her before you show me the airlock."

As confused, himself, as Captain Harkness had looked at first, the Doctor managed to reply, "Thought I showed you the airlock when you got here, Harkness. It hasn't moved."  He threw the man a decent enough facsimile of his normal mad grin and loped to the door. Harkness sprinted after him, stopping only to pocket something from the box that Jack had insisted on keeping near the entrance. Opening the door cautiously, Jack peered outside, nodded to him, and walked out.

He hesitated, dreading the moment he had to look Rose Tyler in the eyes. It was their first time together since he'd… well…  Coward still, he looked past Rose's shoulder and around the control room, adding one more sin to the pile he'd laid claim to.  She sat on the jump seat looking down at her feet, which were lined up and nicely parallel on the floor.  She was chewing a thumbnail and a bit of the thumb itself that cute way she had when she was thinking hard about something. Or procrastinating. Or avoiding. Rose didn't trust him enough to come over, give him her hand and walk outside with him, and he couldn't blame her. He couldn't blame her for not wanting him to touch her in any way ever again, and certainly not for not wanting to stay with him on the TARDIS.

He'd go to her, go on his knees before her, look into thrice-damning hazel eyes and beg her undeserved forgiveness. He'd entreat her to come with him this one last time– _oh Rassilon_ , he needed her to come with even if he couldn't hold her hand.  He needed to feel her next to him, feel as if he were whole… just one last time.

"Rose."

She looked up, finally.

"Yes, Doctor?"

He made an awkward attempt at a smile that failed completely, started a silent prayer to the cosmos until he realized he really didn't know what to ask it for and would probably hate what it deigned to give him anyway.

He nodded thriftily and let his eyes meet hers briefly: a stolen taste, not a final meal.   He knew better than to touch her.  "You feel like coming?"

**~**

The Doctor hadn't really looked at her once, not like he used to—he couldn't, and Rose understood what she had destroyed and what she had lost. Then he took so long to ask her to go with him and Jack, she'd just about decided to go back to bed until he told her they'd reached London.

But he hadn't actually asked her to join him and Jack, had he? Just _You feel like coming?_ , as if taunting her about– no, the Doctor was too good for that, better than the likes of bullies like her and Jimmy Stone deserved.  

The Doctor didn't want her along with them—she really hadn't expected him to want her along with them—but he'd asked her anyway, pretty much, leaving it up to her. Should she greedily take the gift of one final trip?

Maybe… maybe he was offering her a second chance, again?

She couldn't keep him and Jack waiting while she figured out what to do now. "Yeah, Doctor, I’m goin’ with,” she said carefully, looking at him though she dreaded the idea of meeting those eyes.

Her Tyler stubbornness, starched shreds of dignity, and that little bit of hope she carried like a candle with a flickering wick, got her to the door; but her stomach dropped when Doctor didn't offer his hand to her. He held the door for her, but he studiously kept it as a buffer between their bodies. Rose realized that he must have remembered all of it finally: he knew what really happened between them. He knew she'd forced herself on him and tried to use the star sapphires to make him shag her. He knew she'd let him believe he had attacked her and tried to rape her, and then she'd let him come to her in shame and guilt and apologize for it, and she didn't tell him the truth. Why would he ever want to touch her again? Slipping lonely, empty hands inside her hoodie pockets, she stepped outside and moved off to give him room as he locked the TARDIS. He glanced over at her then quickly turned his face away, and Rose had never felt as alone or as small in her life. Tears started again–damn her!– and Rose backed away blindly.

Old memories of her and Jimmy flooded her mind, the words of endearment and promises that had morphed into put-downs and cold shoulders, heated accusation and betrayal; the passion and loving that died in stalking, assault and fear. All the demons Rose thought she had sent back to Hell on the backs of store dummies were back again, even more alive and real. Then, like an old black-and-white horror movie remade with leather and silk and cold unforgiving moonlight, it became the night on the moors… no, on the cold hard floor of the TARDIS kitchen. Rose's mind ran through the images like a projector out of control, looping them over and over. It was the same obscene story as before, wasn't it?! But she played Jimmy's role this time… stalking the Doctor, pulling him down onto her, ripping their clothes, wrapping herself around his struggling body and forcing herself onto him. Rose had once thought that being Jimmy Stone's victim was the worst memory she'd ever carry. She was wrong. Victimizing the person she loved more than anything and forcing him into loving her was so much worse.

She turned her face away from the Doctor, from the shame. She looked Jack's way. Plain old-fashioned fuck-up and her were old friends.

Jack was standing a ways off, further from the TARDIS and her and the Doctor than Rose thought he'd normally be for an instrument scan of a new planet. He was taking readings on a city she could see north of them. The Doctor moved off in a different direction than Jack, though he called out to Jack for some kind of information on the city and they began a back 'n' forth. She thought Jack was trying to get his preliminary recon done fast, and from the look on his face and the sound of his voice, he was trying not to let the Doctor know he was being a bit of a pain. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, pulled out a tissue to blow her nose (although she could have used her sleeve for all they'd notice; she'd given them the distance they merited), and began to study her surroundings like Jack had taught her, trying to muster interest in doing preliminary recon.

Shortly after joining up with the Doctor and her, Captain Jack had started doing preliminary recons. Jack said trouble found the Doctor easily enough without him hanging a _come 'n get it_ sign off his jacket. Before letting them leave the safety of the TARDIS for a new adventure, he would scan the area with all his cool Spock tech, which didn't seem to help them get in any less trouble far's Rose could tell. Then he'd grin and personally check out the Doctor's bum for said sign, claiming it was a necessary part of the recon. The Doctor always made some threat involving an airlock.

Jack finished preliminary recon, but Rose didn't see any of the Captain's usual larkin' about. Nor was there Jack's pat-down of her to find the trouble magnet the Doctor was always goin' on about–the exaggerated search made for the Doctor's benefit as much as hers that usually ended with Jack jamming his hands into her hoodie pockets and tickling her, and the Doctor rolling his eyes. She had expected it all, although she couldn't fathom why, and it broke the tiny, wretched part of her heart that had still secretly believed in second chances. She had hurt them so deeply that the Doctor and Jack couldn't even muster enough… whatever… to maintain the pretence that this was another typical day for the three of them to go exploring and probably find trouble. Rose fought back tears. Had she really thought…? Stupid bint, time to grow up and take responsibility for what was her fault, and stop daydreaming stupid bloody _what ifs_. Stop remembering.

_Oh, definitely stop the bloody memories!_ –Rose screamed at herself. She pressed her fists into her temples hard, hurtfully hard, trying to stop the flashes of recollection that still kept shorting out her mind and her heart like ice crystals on high voltage wire and made the rest of her burn _burn_ for him. Bloody, unrelenting, wicked–wicked bad–memories! Moonlit heather and cotton grass. The feel of him and her naked and entwined. The smell of his leather and his lust. The taste of his lips and tongue, and his sweat-sweetened skin. And the thought, how would he taste, all of him.

**~**

Defrocked or not, Jack Harkness was a trained Time Agent, and there were certain protocols everyone but arrogant, thrill-seeking, irresponsible Time Lords followed. Like having weapons that did more than glow cool blue and hum like a _Smurfs on Ice_ revival. Like trying to anticipate what his team could be getting into and be prepared for the worst possible scenario. Like knowing when and where you were even if some people thought it spoiled the fun. There was serious preliminary recon to do. He hadn't stood around waiting for the Doctor and Rose to drag themselves and their baggage out of the TARDIS. He didn't care that it looked like it a toss-up which one moved away from the other faster. And he didn't hold his breath waiting for either of them to come over to him.

First thing as always, Jack had strode the smooth tarmacadam they'd landed on, making a quick but thorough three-sixty scan with the compact high-powered zoom he'd found in one of the ship's junk bins, and picking out the most likely directions from which an attack on the TARDIS could come. He memorized details of his immediate surroundings, noting Rose and the Doctor standing further apart from each other and him than usual, took readings on the looming city-settlement and studied the results, memorized the pattern of roadway (not freshly poured but definitely not very old) leading to the city-settlement and smaller distant settlements, set in his eidetic memory the most direct road route from the city to the TARDIS, collected geological and weather data and compared it with what he'd downloaded on the TARDIS, wondered where he should start to look for those missing memories and asked himself what was holding him back, eye-balled and then confirmed the position of the TARDIS relative to two major landmarks (He also noted that he was thirty meters directly in front of her door, directly facing the largest building in the city-settlement, and the shadow of the TARDIS's light clipped his right shoulder at 3 o'clock; it might not be important for anything later, but what the hell.), remembered something interesting about the system the Doctor had landed them in and made note to ask about it later.

The Doctor was also doing recon, of a sort, putting a sound track to his own observations. Jack could hear his low, Northern-clipped voice clearly despite the distance between them, and was impressed. Where stealth mattered, this was a very useful ability of the Doctor's. Or more Time Lord mind-play. No, the Doctor had promised, and no matter what a shit he could be, he didn't break his promises. If only Jack could con him into promising not to yap him to distraction anymore while he was trying to work; though the Doctor trying to be conscientious and dependable was kind of cute.

When the Doctor finally shut it and joined him, the first thing the Time Lord did was ask him to take lifeform and heat readings as they travelled to the city-settlement and be on the look-out for areas ripe for a waylaying. That was so OOC for the alien who had a special grin for trouble that Jack turned and looked hard at him. He told the Doctor he always did that but was instructed to make sure not to forget. And that supported his theory that the Doctor had been so shaken up by the _fantaisie sinistre_ that his fixation on keeping Rosie safe was becoming a lot less subtle than usual. But he knew better than to say anything. The Doctor had a superiority complex and an inferiority complex and was pathologically incapable of being honest with a companion when they were looking straight at him.

Rosie stood off by herself, looking over the area the way he'd been teaching her, biting her lower lip, looking young and sweet and sad and… Rose stood off by herself, peering around, maybe trying to be helpful and do some of her own recon. He probably should teach her more Agency protocols and some of his own practices; couldn't count on the Doctor to remember to do anything when he was gone. He gave the Doctor some information he'd requested, double-checked his readings, double-checked his weapons, asked himself what the fuck was he doing with his life, then made some stupid throwaway comment to change the subject from the one floating around inside his head, bothering him with her eyes all full of moisture and her tongue not poking out through the side of a smile.

**~**

As they walked toward the city-settlement, Jack took periodic readings. The lifeform readings were no surprise– they were heading toward the main city after all–but their mode of transportation was significant. "Advanced transport technology," he reported. "There's activity throughout the area, and these babies can get to us faster than we can get away from them." He kept an eye on the readings. "Hovercraft, looks like... No, just speedsters."

"Explains all the smooth new roads," the Doctor said.

"What's the difference?" Rose asked.

"Hovercraft have true antigravity technology–like those cars at Mos Eisley." Jack grinned as the Doctor rolled his eyes, but Rose nodded knowingly. "A speedster has a tight suspension that only makes it look as if it's hovering; it's definitely touching down."

The city-settlement was not far, but the walk made Jack uncomfortable. The Doctor waved at people-looking people (which he told Rose was another result of humans dancing) as they passed by. Some waved back, a few even waved first; but most seemed uninterested in the three visitors. Jack's gut told him that lack of curiosity was unnatural. The lobe of his brain that processed everything through a wary scepticism suggested that was why the Doctor hadn't looked for a closer parking space.

Adding to that, the sun was too bright; the air too hot, stale and sticky; Jack was sweating onto some sensitive and irreplaceable hardware; and his jeans chafed. On top of it, the way the Doctor and Rose were being with each other–were not being with each other, he corrected himself–was making him twitchy. He hated being twitchy on an assignment, especially when the causes were thoroughly incidental and irrelevant to the mission and should stay that way. It was hard enough keeping those two alive–now he had to police the playground too? It would be a good time to repeat the Agency's creed, or the Agents' mantra, or every stanza of _Waltzing Matilda_ from the definitive collection.

It'd be a good time to be at a Marsport bar buying someone a drink.

Hey, Doctor," Jack called back to the Time Lord. "According to my readings earlier, we're in the Segole sector. Never been here before; been meaning to check it out to see if it's all for real."

"It's for real, Harkness, but we're early."

"Were you part of it?"

"Didn't have to be. This lot will do it all on their own."

"Do what, Doctor?" Rose asked. It was the first real comment she'd addressed to him, and it was only because she'd spoken before she'd realized. The Doctor slowed his steps and turned to look at her, turned those piercing alien eyes on her. Rose took a deep steadying breath that didn't steady her at all and only confirmed that the planet tasted and smelled as bad as it felt. She hated it, hated it, hated it and was beginning to feel grateful she'd be back in London soon. Except then he smiled at her, his features softened, and his eyes… his eyes were something she wanted to fall into and never climb out.

"Gonna set up a loose coalition of star-faring species under general law —a league of nations as it were, without prejudice to species, sexual orientation, or religion. Sort of like John Lennon said, but without any hidden agenda."

"John had a hidden agenda?"

"Yep."

Jack looked over to her. "Rosie, everyone has an agenda. It's what you do about it that makes the difference. What will make the difference in this case is once the governments and trade brotherhoods decide to form the union, they will put on the table all their governments' and trade unions' agendas; and they'll acknowledge the existence of deep-seated species, race, and religious prejudices and the psychological and sociological ramifications for the coalition as they deal. You can't just throw away part of what makes you you, but you can bring it into the open and figure out what to do about it. What the members of the coalition will decide–"

The Doctor shushed Jack Harkness with a _"Well done, Captain! Thank-you for the future history lesson, Captain"_ and a sincere, approving big smile. He stopped walking and turned to Rose. With an even bigger smile and arms wide and inviting, he beckoned his brilliant, intuitive Rose closer. He remembered in time, she was no longer his. His arms dropped to his sides, his face fell into teacher mode. "You tell us, Rose Tyler: what agenda would you float before a fledgling league of nation-planets? What agenda would you dismantle?"

Rose's mouth dropped open. The Doctor still believed in her? Whatever was left of her shattered heart quickened and swelled and broke again. She chanced a look at Jack; he was watching her. Nibbling at the tip of a thumb, she meticulously worked out an answer that would make the Doctor proud of her and a league of nation-planets successful. She didn't get to voice her answer, though, because a young woman covered in purple and yellow body paint, wearing only a small animal-hair scarf over one shoulder and breast and a terrified expression ran up to them, threw herself on the Doctor, beseeched him for help, and warned him to avoid the Watchers.

"Priestess or runaway virgin sacrifice?" Jack asked Rose quietly.

"Priestess. The virgin would have headed straight for you."

"Good point." He batted his eyelashes and Rose grinned.

The Doctor rolled his eyes at his companions.

His eyes were about all the Doctor could move. The woman had wrapped herself around his body; his arms and legs were trapped and he could barely breathe without her wild-flowing purple hair or the crk’mont griggin cat's yellow mane getting into his mouth and choking him. She squeaked as he yanked his arms free, took hold of her shoulders and tried to lift her off him. She seemed incapable of doing anything but blabbering incoherently, crying, and abusing the sensitive leather of his jacket, and he was fast growing exasperated. Afraid his irritation might get the better of him, the Doctor decided to transfer her to Harkness so that Rose and he could go check out the city and those Watchers that terrified the girl so.

Rose cocked her head and studied the young thing perching snugly around the Doctor's hips and burrowing under his jacket and beyond, apparently in an attempt to glue herself to him. "Would you call that a hovercraft or a speedster?" Her tongue teased out through side of her mouth.

"Hovercraft," Jack said, grinning appreciatively at the Doctor's bare-breasted, purple and yellow painted, somewhat shaggy, mostly naked inconvenience. He took a large step back, crossed his arms over his chest, and buried his fists in his armpits, signalling the Doctor the problem was all his.

The Doctor's attempts to remove the woman grew noticeably less courteous as her grip on him grew tighter and more uncomfortable. Suddenly his breath hitched and he yelped.

Jack hooted. Rose elbowed him. Her other hand flew up to slam over her mouth and nose, but not in time to mask some unladylike snorting and a deep flush of embarrassment that encouraged the captain. The Doctor stopped struggling with the girl and stared at his companions. Fuck him, he'd keep up all the wisecracking, pull bloody stupid faces and make his own silly noises as long as Rose and Jack would keep looking at him like they were! Especially Rose. Oh, especially Rose! "Oi!" he said, sounding almost honestly appalled and offended, "there's definitely been some touching down."

He fixed the woman with a stern look and she eased her grip on him a bit. Grasping her waist firmly, he pulled her off him and all but dropped her on her arse onto the ground, stunning her into silence. He'd need something useful about the situation in the city if they were going to do anything about it. Crouching onto one knee, he took her chin between his thumb and fingers and raised her face to look at him. His eyes were compassionate and gentle, his mouth in a non-threatening smile. "I'm the Doctor. I want to help you."

"Doctor," Jacked called out, "here comes the welcoming committee."

Jack took up a defence position at Rose's side as several vehicles pulled up to them; his hands slipped into pockets that didn't hold just his compass and mobile. The Doctor pulled the woman up off the ground and drew her along with him as he quickly joined Harkness in flanking Rose.

Despite her embarrassment, Rose's heart had lurched into her throat when the Doctor had smiled at her, his eyes brilliant and laughing, making it almost impossible to breathe in one of the best ways possible. Then Jack had moved to her side with a slight, wry smile. Before she could react, the Doctor was on the other side of her. Rose felt the taut muscles of Jack's upper arm and thigh against hers. She smelt his aftershave and felt the light pressure of the back of his hand and the muzzle of his gun against her leg. The Doctor's heavy leather jacket did nothing to hide the tightly wound spring of his physical strength against her other side, subtle and undetectable inside the loose jacket, and nearly as effective, she knew, as Jack's. The Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness smiled at the men getting out of the speedsters, and Rose was glad that what lurked behind those smiles bookended her rather than faced her down.

"Jack," the Doctor said _sotto voce_ , "let me talk to them. Don't go off half-cocked."

"When I go off I'm always fully cocked, thank you."

Rose giggled. The mostly naked purple girl giggled and Captain Harkness winked at her. Twelve uniformed men strode toward them with arrogant sneers and thick-barrelled weapons. "This is all Jack's fault," Rose muttered. "You didn't pull that sign off the Doctor's arse."

"Oi!" the Doctor whinged, pulling out his sonic screwdriver as the men raised their weapons and Harkness answered them with a friendly smile and two sonic blasters. "What about that trouble magnet you just don't seem able to get yourself rid of, Rose Tyler?"

"I blame the two of you," Jack muttered, turning his most winning smile on the two men who separated themselves from the others and came closer. "If you'd just settled your differences the way normal adults do, we'd still be in the vortex celebrating, one happy foursome."

The Doctor cocked an eyebrow and frowned at Harkness. "Foursome?"

The welcoming committee cocked their guns.

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

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	2. "Gutted and Imprisoned"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Doctor decided that if he survived his life long enough to retire and write his memoirs (as Time Lords had been expected to do), he would title his opus_ "An Impertinent Treatise on the Irony of Living Impertinently" _, and times like this would be the humourous interludes between the really painful parts._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to scifiangel for the pep talk, editing, and mothering. : D

 

The Doctor decided that if he survived his life long enough to retire and write his memoirs (as Time Lords had been expected to do), he would title his opus _"An Impertinent Treatise on the Irony of Living Impertinently",_ and times like this would be the humourous interludes between the really painful parts. He'd been hanging around the Watchers' Snug (literally) waiting for Jack to show up (as Jack inevitably did) to get him down or (just as likely) get bound and chained and hung up next to him.  The dark windowless room stank of urine and excrement (not his), and blood and sweat (there was that). His body was spare; but gravity being gravity, his weight hauled down mercilessly on his shoulders and elbows, and wrists bound tightly, scraped raw, and bleeding. When he shifted, when he even breathed carelessly, his body swung against the cold wall and grazed what felt like old-fashioned type razor blades. Without his leather jacket to give him some protection, the razors sliced easily into his wool jumper and even more easily into his skin.  (It hadn't taken him long to figure out that the razor points were set in a stylized pattern of an eye. Subtle, that.) The ensemble that had replaced his jacket hadn't been made to measure for his six-foot frame—or maybe it had, if the latest fashion in outerwear was viciously painful restraints and bindings of rough-forged metal chain and rope made of knotted jute-like fibres that apparently grew their own splinters.  A tangle of chain and rope twisted through the juncture of his thighs, cut into sensitive skin, and constricted his sex organs.  It hurt.  It more than hurt.  But it hurt a little less when his body was completely still and not touching the razor-bladed wall. Maybe. After three hours of assault, pain, numbness, and dehydration he wasn't sure. Nor was he sure why he'd so badly wanted another typical day.

The first time he actually remembered regaining consciousness, he was already bound and hanging in the torture chamber.  He had demanded an explanation from the attending Watcher, offered him and his (possibly eavesdropping) All-Seeing Eye a chance to explain their actions, and promised assistance if they and their planet needed help for any good and ethical reasons. He'd gotten no response save a savage strike (which led him to reconsider the last part of his offer).  Wordless, the man left him. The jute cut into the Doctor's wrists and hands. The blood-covered knots slid over his skin, and cut him further and deeper. Not arterial blood, not deadly cuts, just fantastically painful; apparently the Watchers didn't want him easily dead. The heavy chain holding him within a double loop around his torso was loose enough to let him slip some centimetres inside the first loop; the effect of the tighter lower loop around his diaphragm and lower ribs was incentive to make him consider trying to hold himself up on those nasty soddin' ropes. The interplay of the bonds that wrapped him up basically just continued to do cruelly effective things to his body at major pressure points and his groin, no matter what he tried.

The next time someone showed up, prodding and provoking him out of his first healing trance, he'd sternly asked them to explain their actions. He had once more offered assistance (with a couple more conditions and a snarky explanation of _'good and ethical'_ ), and threatened retribution. He'd been afraid for Jack and Rose, but as long as his captors hadn't brought up the subject of companions he wasn't going to. 

As he waited for Harkness to come and get him down, various Watchers dropped in to have at him. He'd finally grown very tired of being alternately ignored and assaulted.  The Time Lord made his final threat, the promise of swift and terrible justice when he got free. The Watchers' response stood in front of him now, holding one of the torture devices from the table. He was male, about five foot nine, dressed in paint and animal hair, perhaps forty Earth years of age, and in fair physical shape. The Doctor thought it would be easy to take him if they both were unarmed and standing free, though to be honest he wasn't quite certain he'd be able to stand at the moment. It would be a very good time for Harkness to show up with one of his inappropriate comments and his sonic blasters.

The Watcher brandished the weapon wordlessly and smirked at the Doctor.

The Doctor grinned back. "So you lot have finally come to your senses. Fantastic! Help me down and we'll go over the terms of your surrender."

The attack was methodical, the cruelty too thought-out to be merely reaction to his latest cheek. Apparently the Watcher didn't want anything from him but to be in a great deal of pain, very much afraid, and ultimately utterly broken. Pain was a trifle to the Doctor; he doubted anyone could cause him even half the pain he already caused himself.  For much the same reason he was certain the Watchers would never break him. As his body flailed in the chain and rope, he jammed his eyes closed, bit his lips together, and suffered through the beating reasonably soundlessly, though it did take all he had.

The Watcher grabbed his bare feet and pulled down on his body, dragging his weight against the barely yielding ropes and chain that held him off the floor; the Watcher's toy made his sensory nerve endings tell his brain his feet were on fire; and he was not so reasonably soundless as he had earlier been.  He cried out hoarsely for the Watcher to stop.  He found the strength, or tenacity, or arrogance to try yet again to talk sense into his attacker; he promised leniency and more than fair treatment. His concessions earned him a deep husky chuckle and then a vicious strike across the face. The Doctor hit the razor-studded part of the wall face first. His senses exploded and the room exploded in an aura of colours. When he stopped screaming, the Watcher grabbed his bare feet and heaved down on his body again then pulled him forward. Through the Watcher's laughter, waves of pain, and the ringing in his ears the Doctor vaguely heard the words _grinning defiance_.

"Who… what grinning defiance—" the Doctor rasped, terrified for Rose and Jack.  "Me?  Who else?" The Watcher said nothing more. "Please," the Doctor choked. "Are there… others you are torturing?  I don't know what you want. Anything… I'll do _anything_ , just stop this now, don't torture any one else… please, for your planet's sake… for everyone's sake. "

The Watcher released the Doctor's feet and made a point of stilling his body's residual movement. He stepped away, then, cocked his head and smiled. "Men last the longest. Children are barely worth the effort. With proper motivation a woman will give me everything I ask for, to save her man."

The Doctor threw himself at the Watcher with a wordless shout. The restraints held him back. He lunged again. The futility made him fiercer, the pain made him more than a little crazy. He snarled savagely. His eyes trapped the Watcher in storms of roiling anger, dangerous and commanding. With a shriek the man cowered back to the door. 

The Watcher cried and keened; the word ' _mercy_ ' slipped through his lips as easily as his sadistic boasting had only seconds before. In a rage the Doctor damned the man. He damned all the Watchers and the Eye, damned the city and the planet. The Time Lord boasted he would bring down the government without breaking a sweat… promised a terrible justice on the planet… vowed to remove all trace of it from the cosmos…  called on Time herself to bring his wrath... opened his mind to set his judgment upon the planet and felt Eternity churn and breathe... heard a mindless wretched wailing somewhere in the tempest and pulled himself back in a great panic, all of him, shaking and in tears. Terrified beyond words, the Doctor's mind ran reeling and desperate from a Time Lord's dangerous possibilities.

Ran to her...

 _~^~Their fingers entwined. She smiled at him and caressed his cheek. He took sanctuary in the hand he knew had been created to fit his. The voices stopped screaming into him and his fury stopped screaming back. In that moment Rose's reality was all that was… her hand in his… her cool fingers healing the gash in his cheek… soothing his burning eyes, his hot skin and parched lips… scratching lightly through his hair… whispering over his throat and along his jaw. His lips parted in breath, in question, in supplication. Hers met his, more than soothing; willing, eager. She always knew him better than he knew himself. Her lips and fingertips flittered over his naked body like a million fireflies. Teasing lips found his pulses and challenged them to race with her. His enemies called him a storm—if true, then his lover was a gale force! She rode his blood throughout his body, potent and joyful. Rose asked him what he wanted from her. He told her:_   Everything.  _She laughed and wrapped her mouth around him. He knew a thousand ways to love her. He undressed her reverently and lay her down on soft leather and fragrant heather.  He covered her flushed skin in ancient love sonnets and engraved his name into her depths. She spoke her love and promised she'd never leave him. Like a million fireflies Rose shone bright and radiant, lighting the darkness_.~^~

"Why do you smile?"  An unfamiliar voice asked. "I said, why do you smile?"

The Doctor opened his eyes, saw the Watcher and another, watching curiously.

"Who is Rose," the newcomer asked.

He had no answer, only the wish to be beaten into oblivion again.

"Tell me! Who is Rose?"

"Someone smart enough to know when to escape." 

When they finally left, he slammed his head against the wall. 

 

**~**

 

The Doctor had been singing his favourite Beatles' songs for the past half hour and was doing justice to _"I Am the Walrus"_ when the Watchers came with Jack. He heard the snick of the lock and the heavy door opened on well-oiled hinges.  He kept singing.  Singing bothered the hell out of the Watchers.

A Watcher walked in and gave the Doctor a vicious blow.  He was ready for it; they were predictable, this lot. "I'm among Stones fans, aren't I?" he said conversationally. "That's ok, there's a lot of good music there, like I told Keith when I showed him that riff— "

There was no light beyond the door to relieve a heavily shadowed corridor that most people wouldn't be able to see into. The Doctor wasn't most people. Harkness looked like hell and put up no resistance. Worse, he was scarily silent. Armed guards dragged him in, brutally slammed him against the wall a few feet away, and chained him up.

“Harkness, you ok?" the Doctor asked when the guards had gone. "Jack?"

Harkness was distressingly quiet for a man who would be mumbling, cursing, emoting in some fashion to make the Doctor roll his eyes. Concentrating his senses, the Doctor felt the slight air movement, the breeze, of Harkness's exhalations and put that to the wheezing wet rhythm of the man's breathing. The counts were wrong; timing was off for controlled meditative healing, and the unnatural stuttering in the rhythm worried him.

"Oi, Harkness, this isn't the time for a nap! Jack? Answer me, please!”

“Doc.” Finally Jack's voice came, bringing a joyful relief that hit the Doctor like a surge in the vortex. “Can you keep it down? I'm trying to do my yoga meditation.”

“Yoga meditation?” The Doctor twisted carefully, determined to see Harkness through the gloom. "Jack, what happened after I got Rose away from the Eye?”

The Doctor got no answer from Harkness, just the sound of slow, measured breathing. As he counted the seconds of Jack's _om mani padme hum_ , an inhalation breath was cut off by wet loose coughing. Jack spit something (the Doctor had a good idea what) and picked up the _pranayama_ cycle again.

“Oh, Jack!” The Doctor sighed. “That’s not what I meant by _create a diversion_.”

The attempt at rhythmic breathing stopped. “Please, Doc! I’ve done worse damage shaving without a mirror.”

The grin in Jack’s voice did a fair job of manoeuvring around carefully controlled exhale-inhale-exhale that was shallow, sketchy, and hurting. Fine. If Harkness wanted to make light of his torture, who was he to go maudlin? “That pesky cleft, eh Harkness?”

“You noticed, Doc!” Jack had done a good attempt at sultry; he’d have succeeded if it hadn’t ended in another fit of uncontrolled coughing.

“Jack!”  The Doctor struggled painfully against the restraints, but he couldn't get his body turned to see Jack.

“It's ok, Doctor; I’ll be fine. And you were able to get Rose away from them.”

The Doctor made some noise that encompassed a hum of agreement, a grunt of ire, a groan of guilt, and a sigh of concern; an impossible sound really, but normal for him. Jack found the strength to smile.

“You think she got back to the TARDIS all right," the Doctor whispered.

“Rosie?” Jack whispered back and scoffed, “of course.”

“What do you figure she’s doing now?”

“Same’s you figure.” Jack grinned. His jaw hurt but he didn't care.

The Doctor sighed. “Yeah.”

The two men shook their heads gingerly and chuckled. But their levity didn't go unpunished. The Doctor's body jerked in his bonds and he saw stars. Jack couldn't stop coughing; it brought up blood and bile and would have brought him to his knees if he hadn't been hanging off the wall.

“So,” the Doctor said nonchalantly when they were finally able to speak, “we wait to see what our headstrong Earthwoman has dreamed up to get in here despite my orders to go back to the TARDIS and wait for us.”

“Doctor, if Rose ever stopped disobeying you, you’d be in really deep shit, y’know?”

“Yeah.” 

They were quiet for a while, except for Jack's strained breathing. 

"After I helped Rose get away, I looked for you," the Doctor started in the same low voice they'd been using, a dispassionate debriefing, "I found a locked door behind a huge, heavy tapestry that I have no intention of describing to you. Inside the room were about thirty men and women in purple and yellow paint and crk’mont griggin manes, like that girl we met.  When I offered to help them—"

"They clobbered you."

"Yeah. They told me they're the Watchers of the All-Seeing Eye.  She was with them, that girl.  She was braiding someone's hair, like Rose and her friend do when I take her back for a visit. When she saw me she waved.  I can't figure this one out, Jack. Who are we supposed to help when we escape?"

"Ourselves, Doctor," Jack answered, "and then everyone who will stop here on their way to the Segole Assembly."

"Ah."

"I'll disregard what you said earlier about your role in that."

"The jury's still out." The Doctor strained against his bonds, grunted, stifled a cry as the jute and chain cut deeper into open wounds.

"Speaking of which, Doctor, did you get their version of a trial?"

"Missed it, Jack. Next thing I remember after her waving was the clobbering, as you said, and then I woke up here."

"At a guess, I'd say the police here extort valuables and money out of everyone who is unlucky enough to land on this rock, then they drag the unlucky bastards who can't or won't pay up—or maybe just everyone, it wouldn’t surprise me—to their so-called Municipal Building, where they stand trial before the Eye on charges of desecrating religious shrines, sedition, sexual crimes, and attempted bribery. They're disappeared into this prison and taken to a Watchers' Snug where they are made snug indeed, especially certain nether parts."

"Oh yeah. So they torture them for their valuables and then murder them to cover up what they're doing."

"I think there's more going on. I think they get off on torturing strangers. Did you notice how everyone was looking at us with a cat that was about to get the canary for dessert smiles when they took us in? Not to mention the specific tailoring of these restraints and the table of goodies near the door."

"I wasn't going to mention the goodies. The Watchers ignored them when they brought you in."

"Got a preview after the trial."

"One of the Watchers they sent to torture me mentioned children and women."

"Doc!" 

The Doctor glared at the table by the door.  Something told him Harkness was doing the same. "I don't know if he was lying.  He was trying to provoke me. It worked. I wanted to hurt him. Oh Jack!  I almost… I tried to… "

"Hey! It's ok Doc! Whatever you did—I promise you it's ok." Jack knew what the Doctor was capable of, but he meant it.  He bet the bastard was sorry he'd pushed that particular button.  "He probably was lying, Doctor; like you said, he was trying to provoke you." 

"Jack, we have to stop this now!"

"Sure, sure, Doc; but can you give me a minute to comb my hair?"  Jack tried to chuckle.  It came out bloody.

For a time the Doctor listened to Harkness's attempts to get his breathing and body under control.  He wondered if the man's Time Agent training was enough to offset the ravages of the torture.  Jack had suffered for his sake, his and Rose's— The Doctor had left, getting Rose away to safety; Captain Harkness had stayed behind to fight and be captured.  The Doctor decided that when they had free time, he'd see if Harkness's 51st century body could be trained in some of the Time Lord self-healing techniques; that'd be a big help the next time Harkness—  _Rassilon!_ Why did he always find himself such absurdly heroic young humans to travel with him?

He knew he could help Jack now if he could only get to him.

He could help Jack more if he kept half a galaxy between them from now on.  _Dear Rassilon_ , how had one rebellious young time Lord's grand sedition to subtract from the sum of pain in the universe taken such a horrible deviation from course?  Had he been absurdly naïve or just plain stupid?  He tried to remember a time when he didn't cause pain and suffering wherever he went, tried to name one person whose life he'd touched and hadn't ultimately ruined. He came up empty.  Empty.

The Doctor threw himself into the uncompromising chain and raw biting rope. His body jerked back, arced forward, and slammed back against the razor-studded section of wall. As an attempt to break free it had been a stupid futile effort, but that wasn't why the Doctor had done it. He collapsed, whimpering, nerve endings on fire, every muscle in his body screaming as his body swung unchecked.

"Doc!  Doctor?!"

"I am so sorry, Jack," the Doctor whispered brokenly.

"What are you apologizing for, Doctor? We needed a diversion; it worked, and I'll be fine. These things happen. It's not as if you throw open the front doors of the TARDIS every morning and intentionally take us out and get us…" Jack chuckled. Then he coughed and spit out blood and bloody phlegm. "Oh, wait, let me think about that a bit, ok?"

"Jack, do you really believe I take you out and get us in trouble all the time on purpose, and that I like doing it?"

"Doctor, I think you tend to think you're in the right whatever you do, and you don't necessarily think out what could happen because it doesn't matter how badly you mess up just as long as it's _your_ mess, and you figure you can always get yourself out of it, eventually. Us too, though sometimes I wonder if that's part of your fun."

"If that's true, I'm awfully full of myself."

"Yes."

"It's the sort of megalomania you'd expect from the blokes we're trying to stop."

"I didn't say that, Doctor. You are _nothing_ like the blokes we're out to stop. Everything I've seen tells me when you decide to act you are completely in the right. I sometimes disagree with your execution of the means, but never with the end. You always are trying to bring about something good, and you care about those of us who get dragged along through the mess."

"Maybe I should be more careful, though."

"Maybe you can't be. Maybe it's just the way you are, and we gotta just let you do whatever you want and learn to balance, or leave. The thing is, Doctor, it's hard for a person to balance when he can't see the tightrope, or feel it, and he won't even know when he's begun to plummet. A man starts to ask himself, where am I going to end up then?"

"Do you have an answer to that, Jack?"

Harkness laughed, maybe just a touch ruefully. "In prison, with you."

"Is that so bad, Jack Harkness?" the Doctor asked softly after three minutes of trying not to second-guess whether Harkness's comment was quip or condemnation. "If I'm doing some good, and I need you with me, Jack, is that so bad? As long as we get broken out?"

"Depends. Even if it takes a while, long as we do some good, it's ok. Like now, it's my choice to be here, so that's ok.  This is an answer I gave to a question I asked myself before we left the TARDIS.

"I've been imprisoned lots of times, Doctor. I've been force-fed answers to someone else's questions; been force-fed the questions too and told that's reasonable and good 'cause they know those questions are inside me, just too deep for me to find out on my own. But both the questions and the answers have to be mine, Doctor, mine to find, and I don't want to bump into anyone else while I'm looking in there for them. No one should be playing where they don't belong with equipment that isn't theirs. Not even for the greater good. 'Cause it's my good that matters first, my good to decide. It's way too easy for a man to get lost, Doctor—I know you get that. It's bad enough being lost myself in the dark; no offense, but I'm a solitary soul and I don't respond well to company."

"Yeah," the Doctor said, "yeah. Easy for a creature to get lost in his dark within."  The Time Lord sighed heavily. A good man was bleeding next to him and it was all his fault; Jack deserved the truth. "Been lost for a while, Jack."

Jack thought about things a moment, then, "Me too, Doc."

"I'll always find you, Jack."

"You?" Harkness snorted and managed not to choke on the viscous bloody stuff that ran down the back of his throat. "Doctor, now I am not just worried about the future—I'm terrified."

The Doctor chuckled. "Yeah, ok; you have a point. Rose, then. Rose will always find us. She'll always save us."

"What's her success rate saving you?"

"Takes a while to break into an impregnable prison, Jack. Even for Rose Tyler. Can't get much more impregnable than she's up against now."

"Doc, sometimes the walls have to fall from the inside out."

The Doctor sighed. "That can be harder to accomplish than from the outside in."

"She could drill a hole and insert explosives."

"Ah.  After you then, Jack Harkness."

Harkness smiled softly into the gloom, listening for her; he figured it should be just about time. "So, tell me, Doc, how does a little girl from the twenty-first century get into an impregnable prison that from what I've seen you have to insult the Eye or trip over his Watchers, and be beaten almost unconscious and chained up to get yourself into?"

The Doctor gave a quiet chuckle. "Maybe we shouldn't ask."

"Maybe Rosie should write a _how-to_." Jack sniggered at the snick of a key turning in the lock. 

The door creaked open slowly to the hum of the sonic screwdriver. “Jack? Doctor?” Rose's voice came softly.

"Rose."

A cool blue light flitted through the chamber. It paused at the table that held the Watchers' sadistic playthings, wavered a bit then moved on until the men were bathed in the sonic screwdriver's welcome glow. The light travelled up to the Doctor's face, higher, to his bound wrists, then back to his face, illuminating the deep gash in his cheek. The Doctor gave Rose a small crooked smile then nodded to his left. The beam of blue light followed his lead and found Jack's face.

“Thank you, Ms. Tyler,” Jack said soberly, "Your timely rescue is gratefully appreciated.”

"Yes, Rose, thank you."

That was it from them. No joke, no salacious grin, no suggestive comment, even though the sonic's light clearly revealed that she was wearing purple and yellow stripes all over her body, purple dye in her hair, a crk’mont griggin mane over one shoulder and down one of her naked breasts, a self-conscious sort of smile, and not much else.  It was a relief—in the second it flashed through her mind before she went to work, Rose told herself it was a relief.

The Doctor and Jack were tangled within cats cradles of knotted ropes and chains pulled taut and tight and held fast by locks. A thick, heavy chain and two ropes hung each man off a massive bolt in the wall by his arms and midsection. Rose tied the crk’mont griggin mane around some keys, a small diamond-edged cutting tool, and a switchblade she'd brought, and a chisel she took off the table.  Holding the sonic screwdriver between her teeth to light the way, she dragged a stool over to the Doctor.

The deep gash from his temple to his jaw was fresh, blood was still oozing. Other wounds… Biting her lip and refusing to let tears show, Rose studied the heart-breaking sight to learn where all the rope and chain went, how they connected, what parts of the Doctor's body they bound. Except for the rope and chain hanging him above the floor, the rest of it seemed to be there just to be there.

First thing, Rose sliced through the rope constricting the Doctor's legs and pulled pieces off with an angry expletive under her breath. The Doctor hissed and Rose saw that the rope had dug into his skin. "Stupid," she told herself and went about it slower, more cautiously. She used a key she'd brought to open the locks and started removing sections of chain.  Then she climbed up on the stool and went to work on the chain and ropes that wrapped his arms and chest. Like the ropes around his legs, they didn't hold the Doctor off the floor, and now Rose was sure they were there just to hurt him. Again, the locks opened with the keys she'd liberated from a Watcher, and she removed the pieces of chain, careful not to make any noise. She hacked and sliced the ropes and began carefully pulling the stiff blood-soaked pieces out of his flesh. As she worked to free the Doctor, Rose muttered furiously under her breath—swearing, threatening the powers that be, saying things she'd never thought she'd say in front of the Doctor.  She knew he heard her, but he'd be too embarrassed ever to mention them, and Jack couldn't hear. When she cut the Doctor's wrists free, his arms dropped heavily to his sides. Rose wanted to massage them until his circulatory system could compensate, but he said it hurt too much. That morning she had been too ashamed of what she'd done even to look at him; now she just wanted to hold him and comfort him and make all his pain go away. But she was careful to touch him as little as possible, desperate not to cause him any more pain. It was more than just her fear of touching those awful wounds; the Doctor hadn't wanted to take her hand earlier; he was letting her touch him now only because there was no alternative. When he talked to her, it was only because he had to.

"I'm pretty sure someone is watching," the Doctor whispered.

"Nope. Not any more," Rose whispered back. "Will you be able to walk?"

"Yes."

"Jack?"

"Not so sure about that."

Rose was anxious to get the Doctor and Jack down and away from the Watchers. The thick chain was the last thing hanging the Doctor off from the bolt on the wall. It looped around his torso and she figured she just had to pry open one or two links and get him out, then go on to free Jack while he took care of the rest of his bonds himself. She knew what she’d find under the Doctor's ripped, blood-stained jumper; she steeled herself for it, determined not to let him see her react. But she just couldn't contain a cry when she actually saw how badly injured he was. His torso was bruised and bleeding everywhere. The chains and ropes had scraped through layers of his skin and ripped into tissue. The coil of chain he hung from dug into him so tightly that Rose thought he might have cracked ribs. As she considered where to start, she brushed her thumb lightly over the links. She’d used barely any pressure, but they cut into her skin like rough sandpaper laced with metal filings.

"Leave that chain until last; it'll hold me up."

"I'll hold you up."

"I'm too heavy. Rose, I don't think I can stand or… do it on my own… just… yet." Rose bit her lip. "I just need a minute for the circulation to go back to normal. Superior Time Lord physiology 'n all. Go take care of Jack. Jack's hurt."

"So are you."  Rose went to work on the tangles of chain and rope that had no other purpose than to keep the lower part of the Doctor's body in continuous pain. They were so tightly entwined between the Doctor's thighs and around his groin that there was no way she could free him without touching him _there_ ; but she blinked that thought away as soon as it hit her. She cut through bloodied jute as hard and prickly as rose stems. "Really could do with a working _resonate_ setting here," she mumbled as she began to pry open links of chain. She heard the Doctor chuckle. But as she gently worried her fingers under the bonds to protect his groin he inhaled painfully. "I'm sorry," she said softly, "I have to—" , "I have to—"

"It's … sorry," he stammered, "…. I can't… sorry."

The Doctor's breath hitched painfully a few more times as she worked to free him, and he was clearly fighting not to let any sounds out. Rose pretended not to hear. She pretended not to notice how ripped and bloodied the trousers were.  She pretended not to see that he was trying to hold himself up on that last suspension chain and doing a lousy job of it—and she made sure he couldn't tell she saw. She pretended her hands weren't all over him again, touching him against his will, hurting him no matter how gentle she tried to be. When she removed the last of the rope and chain from the Doctor's body, leaving only the one thick chain that was suspending him, his body dropped a few centimetres further within the loop of chain around his ribcage. He gasped and tried to bite back a groan that sounded more like a sob he'd switched on its way. Rose quickly got her weight under him and wrapped his thighs over her hips, taking most of his weight as she got him out from the final chain.  He slid to the floor under her control, then she held him until he could stand on his own.  His arms had fallen onto her shoulders as he slid; Rose felt them move around her purposely. The Doctor rested his chin on the top of her head and breathed deeply.  She felt his palm on the back of her neck. His cold fingertips tickled a little as he wiggled his fingers to get feeling back.

Rose chided herself not to think about the feel of his body sliding down hers, his legs around her, his fingers in her hair; not to let herself remember… but… oh she was such a bad person!

As the Doctor recovered, Rose went to work on Jack's bonds. It was the same pattern of knotted chain and rope, and Rose was able free Jack faster than she had the Doctor, especially when the Doctor was there to help after a few minutes. Jack made no wisecrack, no comment of any sort; not when the Doctor wrapped his arms around Jack as Rose opened the final chain; nor when he gently lowered Jack to the floor; not even when he held Jack against him chest to chest, their groins all but touching, as Rose massaged his arms and legs. Jack stared off toward the ceiling and took short quick yoga breaths. The Doctor tried to feel relieved not to have to deal with typical Harkness innuendo on top of everything else.  Rose was quietly in tears.

The Doctor did a quick and too cursory use of the sonic on Jack's wounds, but it was enough to give Jack the strength and stamina to get back to the TARDIS. As Jack opened the door to peek out, the Doctor heard him snort. The Doctor's leather jacket was on the floor just inside the door, folded. The Doctor put his jacket on Rose then they made their way past the Watchers' snugs. The Doctor scanned for lifesigns of other prisoners. They stopped to promise the few they found alive that they would be back to free them very soon. The survivors were in even worse shape than the Doctor and Jack had been. Rose made those eyes at the Doctor, but he shook his head. If the Watchers found any change in their prisoners' condition, they likely would murder them. But when they found Jack's blasters, they almost turned back.

Rose took them into an attached garage and showed them where the speedsters were parked. She had the _unlock_ key for one, and Jack easily hotwired the starter.  Rose decided hotwiring was a very important skill she needed to learn. She'd really had no idea how she'd get them home if they couldn't steal a speedster.

When they got to the TARDIS, Rose stayed in the control room while the Doctor took Jack to medbay and treated the worst of their wounds. Then he took the TARDIS back to the Municipal building, and he and Jack went to clean things up. Rose sat on the jump seat quietly trembling, but soon her tears began, fierce and loud and beyond her control. She'd almost lost them.  They'd almost died. They'd almost been tortured to death.

They couldn't imprison everyone responsible, as much as they would have liked to; sadism was endemic to the society.  They dismantled the working government and imprisoned the Eye and his disciples. The Doctor and Jack rescued a family imprisoned just before they had been, as well as the survivors of a school field trip. The Doctor treated them best he could then offered them passage anywhere they wanted to go. They decided to wait for the authorities and take care of the remains of those who hadn't survived. Jack stopped the Doctor from destroying the city, but only because just after they'd left Rose the Time Lord had made Jack swear that he would not let him add to the body count.

It felt too much like a normal day to the Doctor and he wanted nothing more than to take the TARDIS into the vortex, hide in her depths, and never have to come out.  No, he wanted more. The Doctor wanted his soup-bowl fringe, recorder, and innocence back.

 

**~~**

 

Literally two seconds after Jack got the doors shut, the TARDIS was in the vortex. The Time Lord looked over from the central control. "Medbay Jack, let's get you back to one hundred per cent."

"How're you doing, Doctor? You at one hundred percent?"

"I have superior Time Lord physiology and superior Time Lord ability to heal. 'Sides, while I was waiting for you to show up, I put myself into healing trances."

"I used yoga and Time Agency techniques just as good as your Time Lord tricks."

"Last one on his arse on the floor is the winner," Rose suggested levelly. The Doctor and Jack turned to look at her… probably to snark, she figured.  At that moment Rose was exhausted, upset, reeling from being so scared, and a whole lot of other things that didn't include embarrassed because heartsick and furious left it no room. She strode away from the jump seat and stared from Jack to the Doctor defiantly. "You're soddin' full of it, the both of you." 

"Yeah," the Doctor said softly. "I guess we are. Thank you, Rose Tyler." 

Jack nodded solemnly at her. "Thanks, Rose."

"You're welcome." She turned away to… do… something. There had been no _We didn’t die!_ hug.  No Harkness innuendo leading to the rolling of eyes or _out the airlock threat.  And the Doctor still hadn't looked at her for more than a second or two since her hands were all over him.  But Jack and he were alive. They all we_ re alive.

"I've put a mauve alert around the planet and sent a report to the Shadow Proclamation. The planet is now totally cut off from the rest of the galaxy. They'll have to negotiate through several levels of authorities just to get a box of jelly babies imported.  But we should check them in—Oh, d’you think ten years is good, Jack?  Or should we make it five?”

The Doctor didn’t dare look up from his console—not with Rose standing there dressed like that. He'd never have the strength to take his eyes off her again. Cowardly old pervert that he was, he hadn't wiped his mind of the _fantaisie sinistre_ that the Dreamers had woven from Rose’s romantic daydreams and his dark desire.  So hot, inside, his Rose was, and tight. And wet. Her sweet breath on his face…the smell of her arousal…the sounds of her pleasure in his ears…her fantastically imaginative oaths of love and possession, her—

The Doctor slammed his fist down on the control panel.

Rose jumped and whimpered. Harkness stared at the Time Lord, opened his mouth and closed it again, and turned away; he was pretty sure the Doctor wasn't even aware.

— oh, he was a sick sod!  He couldn't stop the images of Rose laid out naked before him or forget the feel and taste and scent of her. Worse, he imagined Rose coming to him freely, imagined taking her completely, loving her in every way he knew. Every time he thought of them like that, he was using Rose, he was taking her without her consent. It didn't matter that it was in his head, his hunger and lust were no less real.  And it didn't matter that Rose wouldn't know—he knew.  He was weak, he was a monster. Every time he used Rose like that, to himself… for himself… he raped her again.

Rose stood by the jump seat, self-consciously fiddling with the crk’mont griggin mane as she watched the Doctor and Jack work at the console. It was her fault that they had been tortured. She had treated them worse than dirt; they repaid her by risking their lives for her.

The Doctor and Jack moved around the Time column, wrapped in her cool green glow. It always looked to Rose like some intricately choreographed alien dance and it was just about the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Her being there only cheapened it all. Her mum was right; she didn’t belong with these men and this marvelous time ship. She had to tell them. Her timing sucked, yeah, but if she didn't say it now she'd only procrastinate until the Doctor finally was compelled to say it. At least she could take responsibility for the results of what she'd done. 'Sides—

Oh, it was selfish, so selfish, but Rose suddenly needed to belong— _really_ belong. If not to the one…ones… she wanted it to be, then to someone she knew really wanted her no matter what.

“Doctor, I need to go home.”

The Time Lord froze.

“Rose," Jack said awkwardly, "you and the Doctor should talk about this alone. I’ll just be—”

“No reason to leave, Jack.” The Doctor was moving at the controls, running, adjusting, pulling this strange excuse for a lever and pumping that makeshift connection as if the fires of the universe hadn't just dimmed. “We’ll jump ahead four years, then, say, twenty, to make sure. Then if Rose still wants, we’ll take her back to visit Jackie.”  The Doctor knew exactly what Rose had meant, but he wouldn't accept it until she said it outright. It wasn't fair, but if he had to do it, Rose had to ask for it.

“I mean… I mean I need to leave. ”

Jack watched the Doctor collapse. Not physically, of course; he was the last Time Lord, which meant, Jack had learned, that the Doctor's stubborn arrogant self-involved streak was worse than those of the twenty best Time Agents Jack had known, including Jack himself. The Doctor's elegantly moving body didn’t show it, but his spirit had been cut away along with his hearts, by a girl totally unaware of her powers. He’d be no good to himself now, the Doctor, just one more solid knock away from slipping onto the bottom rung of despair. Jack knew that with certainty; some things had helped him learn the alien faster.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt either of you," Rose Tyler said softly, not realizing her words had just accomplished what the Watchers hadn't been able to do with their table full of vicious toys. "You’ve given me the most wonderful experiences and adventures, and your respect, and… and… I’ve been the worst kind of horrible to you both. I don't know how you could stand to be with me any longer. I can't stand to be with myself. Jack, I never meant to doubt you. Doctor, I need you to know, what you said to me in my room—you were wrong. It wasn't you at all, it was me. I remember everything, clearly. I know it was me.”

“Rose…”

“Please not now, Jack; I gotta get out of this crk’mont griggin hair and wash the paint off."

The Doctor’s eyes followed Rose out of the control room. Then he turned back to the console. “Yeah, four years should be good.”

“Doctor, Rose doesn’t want to leave. You have to go after her and tell her she has to stay."

"No."

"Tell her you need her."

"Harkness—"

"Fine!" Jack huffed, "then tell her the TARDIS library needs redecorating and you’re colour blind.” The laugh that the Doctor gave him— Well, Jack didn’t want to analyze it.

The Doctor ran around the time column pushing buttons and pulling levers like a maniac, not wanting to hear any more of of Harkness's misplaced advice. He knew how easy it would be for him to manipulate Rose into staying wth him just by saying something stupid like that. 

Stupid, like...  like, _I need you, Rose, I can't face the universe every day without your hand wrapped up with mine giving me strength. I've always loved you, and now that I've learned the taste and scent of your desire and felt your heat, I want to know it again—Rose, I_ need _to know it all again… I don't know how to go on, Rose, without the dream of burning in your heat, without the mad, insane hope of being loved by you_.

He found it in himself to see the humour of it all and chuckled. After all, there's nothing more monumentally stupid than the truth.

That would convince her, wouldn't it! She wouldn't leave. She would throw her arms around him and open to his demanding greedy hands and mouth all over her again ... to this insatiable hunger she would accept for love.

But how could he convince Rose to stay with him knowing he'd be dooming her to lose herself in the morass of his selfish uncontrollable need?  How dare he even think to try? 

He pushed another button on the console then the one next to it, pumped the bicycle pump twice. As long as he was in the neighborhood, after leaving Earth he should visit that exoplanet in the galactic bulge. It should have been a brown dwarf  and the missing mass was troubling. Then he’ll finish his fourth self’s mapping of the gravitational waves from the collision of the neutron stars. Although there was plenty of time, he might as well get it over with. The Dargozn System was almost certainly in the path and will be inhabited by then. He could swing by Pluto on the way to the bulge, he supposed, see how the poor old thing was coming out of her funk. He pumped the bicycle pump and eased two levers down.  Always moving, that was he.

With a curse, Jack Harkness ran around the other way to intercept the idiot Time Lord. But Jack had forgotten his legs were working only slightly better than his lungs. He gagged and lost his footing. The Doctor was there to catch him before his face kissed the metal flooring. Even still, Harkness looked as if he could be the _'BEFORE'_ part of advertisement for the miracle cure for unrelenting pain. The Doctor ran the sonic over him before he could protest even that.

“Medbay _now_ , Jack.”

“I’m fine. I just—”

The Doctor knew that he wasn’t anywhere near fine, but he couldn’t halfway fix what ailed Jack Harkness the worst. Nothing new there. He could tinker, yeah; but he never could fix a damned thing right, maybe even break it worse. With a quick nod he helped Jack stand. There was a moment of uncomfortable eye contact, mouths starting to open then snapping shut like highly embarrassed mackerels, hands stuffed into pockets.

“Guess I’ll take a shower,” Jack said awkwardly. "Unless you'd like me to ..." His eyes dropped to the space under the floor.

“That’s ok, you go  ... uhm... do your ... shower," the Doctor said awkwardly.

Jack nodded. “Don’t forget to replace the trans-spatial interface cable.”

“Right.”

"The TARDIS could fall out of space, Doctor; you could lose the TARDIS."

"Too?"  The Time Lord chuckled. Sort of.

"Doctor—"

"It's her choice, Jack."

"She doesn't really want to go."

"It's my choice too."

 _"She's better off without me."_  Harkness had perfectly mimicked the Doctor's accent and inflection, yet his disgust and frustration with the Time Lord came through clearly. "You're fucking up the best thing that ever came your way, Doctor. That's shithead squared."

"Yeah." The Doctor started to slip under the time rotor console, then stopped and took a few steps toward Harkness. “This repair is gonna take a while; I need to track down a part. S’pose I could do with some help after all; but you’ll be wanting to leave too, I guess.”

Harkness and the Doctor regarded each other without speaking. They stood like that a bit, the renegade Time Lord and the renegade Time Agent, their dull eyes reflecting emptiness back at each other, the thin lines of their mouths refusing to twist into grimaces of pain and despair, and unable to lie their way into anything remotely like smiles; two men who had lost themselves too many times to expect to be found.

 

 


	3. Sinister Realities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack grinned his Jack Harkness grin, guaranteed to make any woman cave. Trouble was, she wasn’t any woman; she was Rose Tyler

 

 

 

“Rosie, open the door or—“

“Or what, Jack?” Rose tried to make her voice steady, but it broke around the tears that couldn't stop. “You’ll kick it in?”

“Don’t have to kick it in,” Jack said smugly as Rose’s door slipped open. “The TARDIS and I have an understanding.” He stroked the wall as he crossed the threshold. “Don’t we, darlin'?”

Rose sat cross-legged on her bed. Her hair was still mostly purple, and the parts of her that he could see, the skin that wasn't hidden by her oversized robe, still were covered in neat purple and yellow stripes. Except for her face. Tears and from the looks of it a sleeve had smeared off most of the paint. She looked like a child. Jack wanted to go to her, put her on his lap and clean the paint off her face, and tell her everything was going to be ok. He didn't. He stood just inside the room and waited. What was he doing there?

“Jack, I really need to shower.”

Rose slipped off the bed and carefully rewrapped her robe, covering her cleavage all the way up to her throat and down to her ankles, cinching the belt tight. Jack pretended not to notice. Their eyes met, only by chance, and hers slipped away quickly without acknowledging it. How many layers of pretence could the three of them add—pretending not to see, not to hear, not to wonder and doubt; not to be able to read the signs and portents; not to love until it hurt and bled out with quiet screams—before the TARDIS crumpled under the weight?

“The Dreaming Stars are perverse little things, Rose. When they come out of hibernation, they play nasty games to wake up—it's like their way of eating a big breakfast. Don't let something that wasn't your intention or your choice ruin what you and the Doctor have. That's real, Rose; what the Dreamers did wasn't.”

"The Doctor said the fantasies are made from what the Dreaming Stars find inside us. That makes them real, Jack. Maybe it's so deep you don't know it yourself; but it's there. It's what you really are; it's your want and desire. It's the world you would make if you had the power they do and there was nothing to stop you."

Rose took a deep breath; then as if the oxygen were foul, she exhaled quickly and made a face. "So I was responsible for what happened; it’s my fault. If I could, I'd apologize to you for the rest of my life, for thinking that you could attack me, and to him for…for… ”

Every centimetre of Rose Tyler's skin Jack could see, that wasn't covered in paint, was suddenly bright pink, burning with Rose's shame.

“I can't stay with him after what I did,” she finished.

Embarrassment, Jack thought, or maybe humiliation. Spare him twenty-first century hang-ups! He closed the door and started over to Rose, feeling a tickling of hope when she met him halfway. “You are not leaving, Rose. I know you; you’re too strong to be scared off of what you want by some induced psycho-physical dream-state, no matter how real the _fantaisie sinistre_ made it seem.”

“You are not listening, Jack Harkness! It was real! And there's no way I can take it back."

"Why would you want to take it back? If someone wanted me so much—"

"Jack! No. _PLEASE_ do not go there."

“Ok! Fine! I won't! But you and the Doctor have to work through this; because if you leave him, it will kill him. And if you're being honest with yourself, you know it won't do you any good either.”

“You're wrong, Jack," Rose said softly. "Staying would only make him despise me, if he doesn't already. And for as long as we'd be together, he would despise himself for having been used and degraded, and for letting it happen. Seeing me every day would only keep the pain fresh.” She looked down at the hand that the Doctor had taken a lifetime ago along with her heart. Empty. So very empty. “I won't do that to him, Jack. I won’t hurt him more.”

Harkness suddenly wasn't so sure that humiliation and embarrassment were fuelling Rose’s decision.

“I’m just passing through, Rose Tyler; but you’ve moved in. You and the Doctor, you’re permanent.” Rose started to protest, but he cut her off. "Please Rose, I said ok; now you say ok. Let me have my say then I'll leave." His side hurt. He needed a shower, bed, and a shot or five of something strong and amber-coloured, and not necessarily in that order. "I won't take long. ‘Sides, between you and _Old Blue Eyes_ back in prison, I’m kinda talked out.”

“Jack Harkness talked out?” Rose scoffed. She suddenly stared at the man. "You still look like shit."

"I missed my daily beauty regimen. Soap and water can be _so_ brutal on a man's delicate skin."

“They hurt you even worse than you look, didn't they."

“Nah. Just feeling a little grubby.”

Jack grinned his Jack Harkness grin, guaranteed to make any woman cave. Trouble was, she wasn’t any woman; she was Rose Tyler. Rose pushed him into a big overstuffed leather chair and when had he become so weak-kneed and unmanfully needy that he'd sit and stay for anyone? Same answer there. Not anyone. Just Rose.

Rose brought over a bottle of something that made Jack's eyebrows shoot up and poured them each three fingers' worth. They nodded and _skoaled_ and threw their drinks back. Then she poured them another. He downed that and allowed himself a minute for the shots to start working. He accepted a third shot and a water chaser but set them on the table next to him. Rose pushed her leather ottoman closer to Jack's chair and sat down. She poured herself another shot but put it along with the bottle on the floor next to her, then looked into Jack's eyes. "I'm listening now."

He nodded. "You didn't hurt him, Rose. No matter what that sweet little overactive imagination of yours conjured up."

"But I— "

"It was something you both want so badly that it drew the Dreaming Stars out of hibernation. It scares you, and it scares him more. I don't understand why it scares _you_ — anyway, I've never seen you let being scared stand in your way."

"He's an alien."

Not much surprised Jack Harkness. Rose's statement did. His eyebrows shot up. "That bothers you?!"

"Of course not! I meant…he's different; maybe he can't or he doesn't have the same kinds of feelings or wants, I mean maybe he doesn't need…"

"You two were alone in the kitchen a while before I came in and broke you up, so correct me if you think I'm wrong, Rose Tyler; but it seemed obvious to me he can."

Rose made a non-committal sound.

"He feels, Rose, he wants, and he needs. Oh, Rosie, he needs so badly!"

"But he didn't _want_ , Jack. He told me."

The Doctor told Rose that? No wonder she was so devastated and desperate to leave. Jack wondered why he even bothered. If only Rose had seen the Doctor’s face when Jack pulled him away from her— certain that there was something very wrong going on and fighting the _fantaisie_ with all his strength of will, even as he wanted and wished with all his soul that it was true and honest, and real.

"Haven’t you been with him long enough to know that the Doctor lies when he thinks it'll help someone, except if it's himself; then he lies to hurt."

“That doesn't make sense! Why would someone who is so good and kind and caring and… Why would he lie to me? Why hurt me to hurt himself?”

“He believes he doesn't deserve to be happy.”

"What a bloody load of crap!"

Rose sprang off the ottoman and started to pace. Jack just kept looking at her as she moved. She turned to him and glared. He kept all emotion off his face, though he wanted so badly to smile. Rose was looking at him but glaring at someone else. Then, as he saw her expression soften and her eyes lose their focus, he had the feeling that she was looking somewhen else as well.

Rose was remembering how the Doctor had looked when she walked through the kitchen to him. Way past any interest in living. Dead, but not to her. To himself. She shivered. “So far he hasn't had enough faith in me to tell me much about himself. Do you know what happened to him?"

Jack shook his head and shrugged noncommittally. How would he explain a twinge in the side of his gut? “He has faith in you, Rose, just not in himself. He thinks he’s dirtying you by his contact…that what he is will ultimately destroy your intrinsic purity.”

Rose snorted.

“Listen, Rose,” Jack sighed, “I’m trying to explain here. Just let me have my say, then I’ll be out of your hair.” Rose started to object again, and Jack felt crappy enough to fight dirty. “You owe me one, Rose Tyler, so sit down, shut up, and listen!" Stunned into contrite silence, Rose actually did what he'd told her without arguing.

"You and the Doctor didn't know they were doing it to you; you didn't feel anything to alert you. That’s the power of the Dreaming Stars: they use bits of a person's own engrams to model the person's state of mind, creating a new experience that fits as comfortably as an old shoe. The experience feels totally real. Even if you start to wonder, as the Doctor did, you question your motivation for what you are doing. It doesn't occur to you that you are fighting off an invader."

"You said it was a _fantaisie sinistre_. That's… What is that? "

"That’s what we call the kind of fantasy you and the Doctor shared. We say it's sinister because it picks your mind at the start, so you can't control it the way you can a daydream; but it's not as if you're asleep in your bed and dreaming either."

"I'll say."

Rose threw back almost half of her drink. She looked as if she was going to down the rest but didn't; but she didn't put the glass down either.

"The Doctor already believes that he’s hurt you just by keeping you with him, living the life he does. When the Dreamers invaded your mind, leeched your feelings and engrams, and grew the _fantaisie sinistre_ into your brain, he didn't recognize it and stop them. In the morning, they used what he was thinking about to play with your mind again." Jack sipped at his drink, peering slyly over the glass at Rose. "By then he knew what they were, and I can only guess why he didn't have his mind shielded to them and couldn't keep them out. But now there are two more nails in the coffin he’s built for himself."

“Maybe the Dreaming Stars did start my _fantaisie sinistre_ , but I rode it hard to the end.” Rose turned red again, but ignored it. “I am responsible for what happened. I know me, Jack, I know my daydreams and fantasies; and I know the Doctor. I should have wondered why he was acting like that; and wondering, I should have known. He wondered. He tried to stop them. I knew that he was fighting something, I could tell. I just thought… The Doctor didn’t do anything wrong. He was trapped in my fantasy.”

"You and the Doctor both wanted it, Rose. He didn't dream—"

"That's right, Jack—he didn't! And even if he did want me, it wasn't his free choice. I let it happen without his consent. My lust and selfishness made it happen."

"Rose, I love you, but _SHUT IT!_ He didn't dream himself fighting it until he was about to have you without your clear consent and both of you in full rational control. I _know_ that, hon; I saw how it was. I saw him stop. And I saw you calm yourself and wait for his lead, and not go after him when he hesitated. Rosie, can you remember that?"

"I've thought about this a lot, Jack. It's more, it's… We have names where I come from, like _tramp, slapper, sexual predator_. I let the Doctor get close to me. I let him depend on me and trust me. I swore I'd never let anyone hurt him again. It was all a lie! None of what I promised him was real. It's not love if it's not real, Jack, it becomes a trap or coercion. I thought… but it wasn't, and I'm no better than— " She took a deep breath. "Oh, Jack,” Rose sobbed, “I'm just as bad!"

Jack pulled Rose into the chair with him and held her as she cried. Whatever it was she was feeling guilty about, he could see it was ripping up her insides. He had a feeling she wasn't talking just about what she had done—no, he amended, what she thought she'd done to the Doctor. Something wrong had left its mark on Rose, something very wrong. He felt too fucking crappy to do an intervention. But maybe he could help Rose start to see that everyone had demons to battle, and the Doctor's demons were so much worse than hers. So he started talking. Call it his going away present to two people he'd come to care about, more than a Time Agent who wanted to keep breathing should ever care about anyone.

“Whatever you’ve done, Rose, it’s not on the scale I'm talking. You couldn’t even think the scope of what he’s carrying around inside his head.”

Rose pulled back and stared at Jack Harkness. ”You do know! He told you.”

Jack heard the implication: _But he wouldn’t tell me_. “Not a word. I’m a trained Time Agent, Rose. I can’t read time like he can, or control it; but I can feel when things are wrong. And there’s a whole chunk of reality around him that just isn’t right. I figured some of it out, that’s all.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if the Doctor even knows it all.”

“You saying he’s _WRONG_?"

”Oh, no Rosie! He’s just about the most right thing we could ever have going for us, and don’t let anyone—especially the Doctor—convince you otherwise. You know how the TARDIS and he always seem to mistake their way into places and situations that need to be helped?"

Rose snorted. "Yeah."

"I think it's not that simple."

Jack thought back to some of the tales Time Agents swapped over a keg between missions. _A great war raged throughout Time and Space between two ancient races of immortals with the power to bend reality to their wills. Two adversaries are ill met in the last great battle and again in the first. The destroyer, obscenely crazy, vows to exterminate Reality and purge Time. The champion gives his lifetimes of immortality to rescue civilizations and heal Time's wounds._

The tales made more sense if you took them not as myth, or even allegory, but as chronicle; add the bits of inexplicable entelechies that the Time Agency had meticulously accumulated and tagged as fragments of overwritten history; and then drop a certain grinning, crazy, do-gooder alien into the bulls-eye of the mix. "Time's champion," Harkness mumbled.

"Someone said that to him on a space platform once," Rose told Jack. "Don't call him that to his face, Jack, unless you are prepared for a storm of emotion and maybe a trip out an actual airlock."

Jack's eyebrows climbed. "The Doctor is a legend, Rose. No one believes he’s real. He can tell when things aren't the way they should be, and fix them. He can fix Time when something makes it go wrong. Some things, though, you can’t just fix like setting a broken bone. Sometimes you need to amputate a sick part so the body can heal. ”

“What he did, Jack… was it real bad? Did he have to hurt a lot of people?”

“Hon, like you said, there’s hurt and there’s hurt. He saved everyone he could. If he hadn’t done what he did, there’d be no one left… there'd be nothing. Only darkness and evil.”

"Is that why he's called the Doctor?"

"I don't know… maybe?" Jack shrugged. What did he know about the Doctor for certain? _Time bled. The Champion wrought destruction. The Madman fell into lucidity, Reason went insane, and the Lady's hearts broke from loving._ Stupid allegory.

”When the Doctor asked me to come with him, he told me the Daleks killed all his people. Everyone lost, he said. He’s the only Time Lord who survived, Jack, and the Dalek in van Statten's bunker was the only—”

“You met a Destroyer—a Dalek?! They are real?”

“Yeah. I released it somehow, and it killed hundreds of people.” Rose shook her head sharply then took a good-sized sip of her drink. The memory was still there, always there, tied to the taste of death, inexcusable responsibility, and unspeakable guilt. “It killed them because of me. I was responsible for so many deaths, Jack. My DNA changed it. The Doctor said the change was making it crazy and killing what it was, and it wanted to die. He went a little crazy too, when he saw it and was going to kill it.” Jack didn’t need to know the Doctor had gone after it with a friggin’ cannon.

Jack shook his head in a mix of awe and horror. “A crazy Dalek and a crazy Time Lord, each the last of its kind, both with a death wish and on a vendetta! What happened?”

“He stopped himself. The Dalek ordered me to order him to die, and I did. The Doctor said it was a blessing for the Dalek, but that made him so sad because now he’s the last survivor of the war.”

“The Time War,” Jack said. Rose nodded. “You say he stopped himself from hurting the Dalek?”

“It wasn’t hurting me. It killed all those people before, yeah; but then it was sick and dying. It just wanted to be free when it died. The Doctor saw that, and he stopped. He told it he was sorry, and he let it die free. That was its choice.”

Harkness nodded. “A good man stops himself whenever he can. When he can’t, he finds other ways to stop himself.” Jack studied the Earth girl. “Remember that, Rose Tyler; it’s important.”

“Ok,” Rose said.

Jack could tell he had confused her, but she was trying to apply all that she’d learned with the Doctor to figure it out. Rose Tyler, twenty-first century girl from one of the London estates, traveling with one of the most powerful beings who ever lived if legend be believed, had seen—hell, she had _done_ things that could make veteran Time Agents on a restore mission choke with their fingers on the trigger. And the insanity of it all was that this alien and this shop girl did it without weapons.

Jack let his eidetic memory replay what he knew of the War between the Immortals, ignoring all the _Wagner Does Time Paradox_ crap. Onto the stripped-down narrative of the epic battles that ravaged space and time, he fit the Agency's catalog of stunted and partly aborted entelechies and the historical eccentricities they'd seen during the Doctor's apparently inadvertent stumblings into one fine mess after another. For a moment the trained Time Agent actually doubted his analytic skills. But no, there could be no doubt about the nasty impossibility staring him down—the incontestable anharmonics of cosmology that bespoke erasure and rewrite on an awesome and terrifying scale!

Even worse, when he tried to fit in what Rose had just told him about the confrontation between the last Time Lord and the last Dalek, Jack's synthesis hit a wall the size of the local group. He suddenly felt as if he were sitting in the loges watching _Gotterdammerung_ , but the libretto was _Sein und Zeit_. He tried again. Then again. The hell with Wagner, his gut said; what you need to figure that Time Lord is a Hail Mary.

“Rose, I think that the Doctor lost everything in the Time War, and then he willingly gave up any personal future he could have made for himself in order to fix things best as they could be, help the civilizations that were damaged, and help Time heal. I see how he is with you, how you are together. You mean everything to him. He's terrified of losing you. But he’s terrified to keep you with him. He’s terrified of what could happen to you, in spite of him; and even worse, because of him. But Rosie, he needs you so badly!”

"Then why—" Rose bit her lip, stood and turned away.

"—did he stop?" Jack finished.

"S.ss.sorry?" Rose stammered.

"I said-"

"Yeah," Rose all but whispered. "Why?"

"Rosie." When she turned back to him, Jack smiled at her tenderly. "Why would you stop?"

Rose thought about it… About someone who loves you – who you must know loves you because it's clearly so obvious that everyone else can see it – basically throwing himself at you suddenly. If the Doctor loved her like that, and he came to her now, wanting her… and something inside her said, _'No, you know this isn't normal for him. This isn't his choice, this is…not right…'_

“It wasn't you coercing him or trying to seduce him, Rose; and he doesn't believe he was fighting off the willful attack of a beautiful blonde sexual predator from London. But I can’t convince you of that. There are only two people who can, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"And maybe only one who can stop him from hurting himself?"

Jack gave Rose a look that Rose had never seen on him before. It was unsettling, so… Serious. Mature. Knowing. Expectant. Yet so Jack, Rose realized, Jack without a quip or comeback, without innuendo, without irony.

I’m not leaving,” Rose decided. “I love him and I’ll do anything to help him.”

Jack laughed. “In spite of him?”

“There’s nothing the Doctor can do except drive me away, and he’d have to figure out something a lot worse than me forcing him to act out one of my wet dreams about him to get that to happen.”

”Like throw you out a non-existent airlock?”

”Oh, Jack! You know he wouldn't. He threatens you only because he likes you.”

"What would he do if he loved me?" Jack wondered. He watched Rose Tyler try for a smile. It was small but he'd take it, a souvenir for when he was gone.

"If you're right about him, I guess, then he definitely _would_ throw you out an airlock. Thank you, Jack Harkness, for everything." Rose moved to hug him, but he lurched back, away from her open arms. Rose looked confused, then wounded. She blushed and backed off quickly.

Feeling like a real schmuck, Jack put a hand to his side and grimaced. But that wasn’t the part of him that would hurt, maybe beyond his ability to handle it, if he let Rose Tyler hug him as if believing in him could be anything more than toggling an on-off switch. There had been enough dangerous fantasies in the TARDIS already. And he really needed to get away; there was something he needed to think about.

“The Doctor shouldn’t be alone, Rose. I think he’s his own worst enemy. At least, he does a good job of trying to be.”

“You’re leaving!”

“It’s time, Rose. I wasn’t made for staying put. There are things to see and people to do.” He grinned.

"I want us to be ok, Jack. It's important to me, and I hope it's still important to you."

"We're ok, Rose."

"We are _not_ ok. I should have believed in you from the beginning, in spite of those soddin' Dreamers. You say you saw me stop and wait for the Doctor's lead. I should have stopped and waited for yours. I should have wondered why I suddenly decided it wasn't a dream, and why I thought you could ever attack me."

Rosie should have, yeah. Jack knew that people usually did what they thought they should, not what others wished they would. A leap of faith was fine for Kierkegaard and Indiana Jones, but people were just people. Funny, though-- he'd somehow thought that Rose Tyler would be different than people; she be … she'd be Rose.

Rose frowned, thinking about how to say what she felt. “I can’t promise I won’t ever doubt you, Jack; but from now on, I will always give you the chance to explain. I know it's not good enough, but this is _me_ talking, no fake sapphires, and I won't lie to you or give you partial truths. Remember, if I don't offer you that chance when we're into something messy, you can be sure that I'm not in control."

Jack nodded.

Rose cocked her head and stared at him. "And you'll know to save me."

"Yeah, ok." That was weird. But Rose seemed serious. And she didn't try to hug him again, which was good, right? Yeah. His side really was killing him.

"The Doctor needs you, too, Jack; I can see it. 'Sides, he's good for you. Well, he's good for everyone." Rose gave Harkness a quick grin. "And you need to be here."

"Rose—"

"Sometimes, Jack, I think some part of you believes that you are still dancing on an invisible space ship in a blitz, waiting for the sirens to go off. You are a wonderful, caring, brave, good man, Jack Harkness. I don't think you've learned that yet. You need to stay so you can learn to believe that."

"I appreciate the sentiment, Rose, I do. But I'm ok."

"No, Jack, you're not."

"Hey babe," Jack crowed, "I'm the most _ok_ gorgeous, hot, wonderful former Time Agent with a perfect bum and a black hole in his memory that _you'll_ ever meet." Jack gave Rose his best grin. But she was Rose Tyler; she saw through it.

"Tell you what, Jack Harkness: I tell you, you tell me."

"Nothing to tell, Rose Tyler. There's stuff I don't remember because of the mind-wipe; the rest is ok." Jack shrugged his eyebrows. Then he took a long drink of water. Then he finished off the contents of the other glass.

Cocking her head, Rose looked at Jack solemnly. "Ok." She picked up the bottle of the stuff that wasn't water, set it down on the table close to Jack, then moved closer to the both of them. She took a deep breath. "See, there was this bloke. I knew he loved me, and I loved him. And I needed him like air, and I believed in him. " She scrunched her face up a moment then frowned. "Maybe I believed in him because I needed him. Anyway. Because I believed in him, I was sure he believed in me, believed in us. I thought we belonged together, him and me. He said we belonged to each other, and he said he'd never hurt me. I'd have done anything for him; anything he asked…"


	4. "The Con"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You just can't tell the truth, can you, Doctor Are you_ physically incapable? _You can't admit that Rose and you had no choice, and that it wasn't your fault. Why Doctor? Just tell me No, tell_ both _of us, me_ and _you. Why?"_

  

  

  

Self-triaged, showered and changed, looking quite dapper in jeans, form-fitting and bruise-concealing t-shirt, and leather jacket, Jack Harkness strode into the kitchen. He took the mug of coffee that was waiting for him in the Doctor's proffering hand for one sip and made a discreet _not bad!_ gesture as he gave it back. He slipped off his jacket and slung it over the back of a chair across the table from the Doctor, sat down, and accepted the mug again.

“Everyone wants to buy me drinks today,” Harkness said, took a long sip, and sighed with pleasure. “The TARDIS makes a mean cup of coffee." At the change in the pitch of the time ship’s hum, he smiled. “You’re welcome, darlin’; you're a quick study. You can make it for me anytime you feel like it.” 

”Harkness, stop trying to seduce my ship,” the Doctor said automatically.

“Rose is staying,” Jack said. 

“I should throw you out the airlock for that,” the Time Lord said sadly. 

“Things you’ve told her about yourself, she knows she’s all the people you have. Early on, she promised to stay with you, and you agreed." The Doctor nodded. "Since you don’t go back on your word, she figured her leaving would release you from a promise she thinks you're regretting now."

"What? Why would I regret it? Why would she think I'd ever regret having her with me? Doesn't she—"

"No. She doesn't. Rose has been beating herself up for loving you so much and wanting you so badly that she forced herself on you against your will, and would have molested you if I hadn't stopped her. She thinks it wasn't the Dreaming Stars that caused it, it was her desire and lust using them. She honestly believes she was responsible for it going that far.”

“But I told her, Jack! I told her she shouldn't blame herself for what happened; I told her it was all my fault, I should have stopped it. I told her that I'm sorry."

“ _That’s_ what you said to her?" Harkness yelled, "You crazy son of a bitch! You know how much Rose loves you, and don't pretend to me you don't! And you told her that seeing her naked and feeling her, and being inside her and her taking her pleasure was something you regretted? 

"You just can't tell the truth, can you, Doctor— Are you _physically incapable_? You couldn't tell Rose that the Dreamers robbed you both of your free will, and from the start neither of you was responsible for anything you did in the _fantaisie_ state. You couldn't tell Rose to stop blaming herself because there is nothing— _nothing_ — either one of you can blame yourself for! She didn't force herself on you without your consent and you couldn't stop it from happening. What you and Rose did in the kitchen was caused by the Dreaming Stars. It was their fault... but the _hell_ that girl is going through now is all your fault, Doctor. 

"You can't admit that Rose and you had no choice, and that it wasn't your fault. Why Doctor? Just tell me… No, tell _both_ of us, me _and_ you… Why?"

The Doctor turned away without answering.

Jack exhaled forcefully and shook his head— two things he realized too late he shouldn't do after a typical day out with the Doctor.

“If you want to fix this, Doctor, to fix what you've done to her—what you've let her think she's done to you—you’d better get up off your fat ass right now, go to Rose, and convince her that even though neither of you chose to act out what you did, you _have_ wanted it, _like that_ , every bit as much as she, that you’re glad it happened finally, and you want it to keep happening.”

The Time Lord mumbled something, not in English.

“You so sure I don’t understand what you’re saying? I could—" 

Jack Harkness shook his aching head gingerly and backtracked. “Rose is a pure human, Doctor; worse: a girl born in the twentieth century.”

“A girl,” the Time Lord repeated dumbly. “Jack, she’s just a girl."

“Is that gonna be part of your list of excuses now, Doctor? _My people are gone, my planet is gone; I’m alone; the person I love most in the universe is a human, an ape… just a girl, a child_ —”

"Shut it, Harkness! I saw the sapphires and topazes around her neck. I should have realized Dreamers were making her… making us… My blindness— my _stupid_ blunders cost Rose. I never should have asked her to come with me, and I'll live the rest of my life knowing it… knowing I destroyed all the good that was left in my life. Every time I close my eyes, I'll see Rose spread before me like that, offering me a lie and me taking it, even knowing. How could I ever let myself—"   The Doctor slammed his fists against the table. "And I didn't save her," he sobbed. "I should have realized what was happening and found a way to stop it when I still could, before it became this … _obscenity_ that I couldn't control and couldn't stop!"   His eyes raged at the human. "You don't know, Harkness, you can't understand who I am."

“I understand perfectly,” Jack said levelly. He reached back into his jacket pocket and pulled out a cinnamon stick, thumbing open a little metal box as he did, and started to suck on the candy.   “And it's not just innocent children like Rose that you have taken and ruined... that you destroyed. You are a murderer, Doctor. You committed genocide. You wiped planets and systems and civilizations out of existence, out of history, out of Time. More than that, you unravelled time lines; you destroyed possibilities and aborted trillions upon trillions of lives. You raped the minds of every individual who ever lived or ever will live, of their real and possible memories. There has never been, nor will there ever be, a single creature that your scalpel didn’t touch.” 

  The Doctor was staring at him, unmoving... barely breathing... as if Jack physically had him under his control and he couldn't turn away.   “See?” Jack smiled grimly around the cinnamon candy, “I know it all, Doctor. You are a monster.”

The Time Lord finally dropped his eyes from Jack’s. Jack looked at the bowed head, the body trembling from deep wracking breaths and the strain of the Doctor’s attempts to shore up his faltering control. Jack’s eyes travelled over the table again, not missing the hands fisted tightly— maybe to keep Jack from seeing how they were shaking or maybe to keep from grabbing and pummelling him— fisted so tightly that they’d gone white.

“It’s in the air, wherever you are, Doctor: the feel and taste and smell of cauterized time. You stink of it.”

How he could still talk with the Time Lord’s hands suddenly around his throat and knee in his belly Jack Harkness didn’t know. What would come of it, for him, he didn't need to consider. Why he had done it… there was an easy answer.

And that was why he kept at it, why he kept hammering the Doctor with his words, even as the Oncoming Storm broke with a rage of pain and will that transcended weak human morality, and fists that carried Gallifreyan strength, and time manipulated into a weapon— wielding them with the grief and guilt of a mad broken hero who had just lost the last bit of hope in his life.

And Jack Harkness didn’t close his eyes.

   


	5. "Coward, Any Day"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"That's me, Jack Harkness; too stupid to get himself dead along with the rest." "Or too strong," Harkness shot back at him and the Doctor laughed. "Sure, I'll give you that: strong and stupid and still alive. A lot like you, Time Agent."_

 

 

 

 

“That was a damned stupid thing you did, Harkness.”

“No.”

“I could have killed you.”

“No.” Jack thought it was a toss-up which of them was breathing harder, though he was proud that he was the one to stop shaking first.

“You’re so damn sure about everything!”

“I'm sure about that, Doctor.” Jack Harkness prided himself on a lot of things: his perceptiveness; his ability to read people; his patience to wait for the right moment to act; and his impeccable sense of timing. He also prided himself on his reflexes and strength, and an ability to get himself out of messes that the less perceptive and less patient, and possibly less foolhardy, would never be in. And he prided himself on his mostly unfailing ability to judge a person's character. For the rest of his life, whenever he remembered his time with the Doctor, he would feel awe and wonder at the goodness and caring still inside the broken, cynical man the Time Lord had become. He pulled a little metal box out of his jacket pocket, taking care to close and lock it before he sent it sliding over the table to the Time Lord.

The Doctor laughed. Raw, on the knife-blade edge of despair, it was not particularly pretty. “You have more faith in me than I do, Jack Harkness.”

“Yeah, that’s always been your problem; first with Rose, now with me.”

“ _THAT_ is my problem?” The Doctor actually chuckled.

“Well, one of them. If you want a list: you don’t have faith in yourself, you don’t have faith in us to have faith in you. You’re blinded by despair and loneliness and self-hatred for what I’m pretty sure you not only didn’t want to do but damned near killed yourself trying to stop, to see that we can know you and love you as you are. Your time worm has a self-fulfilling disaster feedback loop bigger than the rings of Jupiter: you push people away because you believe you don’t deserve to have anyone close, so you end up with no one, which proves to you categorically and irrefutably how undeserving you are of friendship and love.”

“Anything else, Harkness?”

“You have lousy taste in shirts.” Harkness let himself collapse fully into the back of the chair. Let it do some of the work for a while!

“Why Jack? I could have hurt you badly. I...I could have killed you. You said it: you know what I am.”

“Yeah." Jack Harkness raised his head and stared at the Time Lord. "I know exactly what you are, Doctor. It’s completely clear to me that you don’t have a clue. I figured it was time for you to come to know in your mind and your gut and hearts what I do in mine.”

The Doctor looked down at the ring of angry red marks he'd made on Harkness's throat, swelling and growing angrier. “My gut still disagrees with yours, Jack Harkness, and I’d say my hands and my right knee just made a pretty good case for listening to my gut.”

Jack shrugged and laughed deeply. He started to cough, grabbed hold of his belly, then his side, and tried to catch his breath.

The Doctor caught Harkness as he slipped out of the chair. Giving the TARDIS a mental shout to increase the oxygen and air pressure in the control room, he held the human steady until the paroxysms of heavy loose coughing stopped and his heart rate evened out. A quick diagnostic with the sonic reinforced his determination to get Harkness back into medbay. He was pretty sure Jack still would refuse to go peacefully, and kicking and cursing no matter how ineffectual wouldn't help either of them.

“Usually I have to buy the gentleman a drink first,” Jack gasped when he was finally able to talk.

"You're impossible, Harkness." The Doctor rolled his eyes and cautiously let Jack go.

“So are you, you stupid git Time Lord."

The Doctor considered the human's comment then nodded. "That's me, Jack Harkness; too stupid to get himself dead along with the rest."

"Or too strong."

"Strong? Sure, I'll give you that. Strong and stupid and still alive." He laughed. "A lot like you, Time Agent. Was it worth it?”

“You will always be worth it, Doctor. That’s one of the reasons they chose you to do it. Do you think just anyone could be bullied into something like that, and strong enough to take it on? Even a god-certified saint–“ Jack raised his hand against the Doctor’s imminent interruption. “I know there isn't and there aren't; but as I said, even a saint couldn't carry the weight of the knowledge and grief without going crazy. Even he would have to be guaranteed he wouldn't come out of it, or total _lethe_ if he did.”

Jack heard the Doctor's breath hitch and looked up into the pale, hell-hounded face of the alien. “They promised you _that_ if you survived the Time War, Doctor? Of course they didn’t deliver! They were never going to. They needed one of them to live and remember in case it didn't work and something more had to be done. One person left to mourn all who couldn't be saved and become the repository for the overwritten memory. Someone to protect and watch over the new time lines while Time healed itself."

"Harkness, don't press your luck!"

Jack Harkness had a sudden thought. It was sick and insane, yeah, but he had to know.

"Even the gifted Time Agents don’t have anywhere near the kind of time sensitivity that legends say the Time Lords had, and none of their natural ability to control time, leastways not when I was with the Agency. But if we had tripped over any non-alpha time lines erupting out of a Time War or futuring into one, we would have been alerted to the War by the echoes of chaos from the causal nexus. Backward or forward, something would show, to mark an Event that colossal. Having gotten even just that inkling, that twitch, we would backtrack the nexus and make sure to keep monitors on it. We would have been all over it."

“ _Please_ , Jack!"

“Tell me.”

The Time Lord shook his head and started to walk away. Jack pushed off the chair and caught hold of him, wrapping his hand over his shoulder. The Doctor jumped, then pulled away with a shudder.

"No star sapphires, no compelling here, Doctor," Jack said. "Just you and just me. Tell me. You need to tell someone once because it's destroying you... but not killing you. Tell me. Then wipe it."

"You'd let me do that?”

Harkness shrugged. “There's such a big hole filled with nothing in there already," he said lightly, "what difference can a little bit more of nothing make?"

The Doctor shook his head. Harkness wrapped his hand around his shoulder again. This time he didn't jump away, though it took a lot of will not to. He looked into the young man's eyes and saw the pain and understanding and compassion of a man who'd lived too much of it himself, who struggled with every day and with every night, with silence and absence, with the horror of knowing he had missing parts and the clarity of numbing, unbearable loss. Harkness, the Doctor thought, was much too young to be so old.

"Tell me," Jack repeated.

"Jack, after what the Time Agency did to you, you'd let me into your head, allow me to take away a memory?”

"Yeah."

Jack sounded like Rose when she'd told him to launch a missile at her. "How do you know I won't–"

"I know." Jack looked into the Doctor's eyes, showing the Time Lord all the sincerity and trust in his. "Do it," he said.

What the Doctor saw in Jack Harkness's eyes only made him feel worse. Jack...just like Rose. Someone else who trusted him completely. Someone else he didn't deserve and didn't want to lose… someone else he'd end up hurting if he let him stay, and he'd lose if he let him close. "I'd never intentionally or willingly alter your mind, Jack Harkness, evidence to the contrary."

"I know. Tell me; we'll go from there." Jack moved to the cupboard, got out a bottle of something even stronger than Rose had given him, and grabbed a couple of mugs off the counter. "The first time you voice it, Doctor, feels like it’s going to kill you. It doesn't."

"And that can be even worse," the Doctor said softly.

Jack laughed hollowly. "Yeah, but at least _you_  know what it is that's whispering to you, all the time, trying to goad you into doing something creative with your wrists and a regulation-issued Swiss Amy knife."

He gaped at Jack, gobsmacked. Jack shrugged lightly and gave him one of his dazzling Harkness smiles.

The enormity of what he'd done left the Doctor reeling, mind and body.  With his self-serving lies and certainties he had ripped open this caring man and left him with the scars of his eviscerated empathy. Harkness was a good and loyal friend, a good and honourable man, yet he had no one that he knew of to speak on his behalf. Nobody... except two whose knives were in his back. 

Jack put the bottle and mugs in front of the Doctor, and eased himself back into his chair. "Tell me, then tell Rose."

The Doctor shook his head and looked down.

"If only what you do is what you are, then we're all of us damned by our foibles. We all need you to be here and whole for us, Doctor. Whatever happened, whatever you did, Rose and I love you. Rose is in love with you." Why that did it, Jack didn't know; but before his eyes the Doctor folded.

“Oh, Jack!” the Doctor keened piteously. “I couldn’t– I wasn’t…" He stopped and swallowed a couple of times, close to tears. Dropping heavily into the chair next to Jack's, he got a grip on his emotions and nodded to the man patiently waiting for him to continue. Harkness nodded back. Neither man mentioned the Doctor's hands. On the table. White-knuckled. Trembling. "And now they’re all dead,” he finished quietly. He started to take a breath, but he couldn't keep it steady. He swallowed it down, hard, shutting his eyes with the pain. “The Time Lords always suspected the worst that Davros could unleash. They had sent me back to destroy Davros’s babies before. They dumped me at the mutants' nursery with my companions and the order to destroy the nascent Dalek race or else. I could have stopped them right then, before they became Daleks. I had the opportunity and the means… but I didn't."

“You couldn’t destroy an enemy who hadn’t become an enemy yet. No genocide in your character. Got it.”

The Doctor stared at Jack Harkness. Just stared.

“If the Time Lords didn’t have any idea the War was coming and just wanted you to obliterate their enemies before the beginning, they wanted you to meddle with time lines. We both know that seldom comes to good ends, no matter how careful you are. If they didn’t look at the possible futures before they sent you, they were fools. The legends say the Time Lords were the most brilliant species who ever lived–just saying."

"Time is in flux, Jack; not even a Time Lord can see an infinite number of possibilities.”

"Hmmm," was all Harkness said to that.

“Jack, " the Doctor pressed, "one possibility out of billions is easy to miss unless you are zeroing in on it."

Jack studied the Doctor. Apropos of nothing he said, "Rose said you met a Dalek that survives the Time War."

"It will land a few years from now. It had gone insane."

Harkness scratched the back of his head. "Sometimes, time and tenses give me a headache."

The Doctor smiled. "Yeah, me too."

"Y'know, Doctor, the Time Agency never really believed Daleks existed."

"Then the Agency is lucky they never came up against one."

"Yeah. Say…just for the sake of conversation, say that a causal nexus exists as an existential potentiality. As the Time War rages, the Daleks could have sent one of their soldiers to watch the nexus and to look out for whom else will be watching. If it had been the Agency's gig, we would have secured the causal nexus and stationed time operatives at spatiotemporal intervals to spot if it actualizes itself; and we'd have made damned sure the Daleks will always know we are in control of the nexus." He shrugged big. "Why play our cards close to the vest? There would be nothing for us to gain from it, and literally everything to lose."

"Unless you want to give your enemy enough rope to hang himself," the Doctor said.

Jack's lip twitched, but he only nodded. "There is that. Dicey though, given what's at stake. You never checked, though?”

“I never look at any future that involves me, it’s just–”

“Yeah, I get it. You know, Doc, you’d make a lousy Time Agent. A damned fine renegade, though. But I think you already figured that out. Just as you already figured out that someone had read the last chapter, torn it out, and put the book back on the shelf.”

The Doctor suddenly looked his age.

“Go on,” Jack said softly.

“War came. Some of us defended the existing time lines while others ran missions to shore up their integrity. More of my people joined us, especially when star systems started disappearing and new alternate time lines appeared, but there never were enough of us. We could see it happening, you know? Jack, we could see both the lost originals and the Daleks' bastard replacements, and the death and destruction in between."

“Not one of the Time Lords ever warned he saw the Time War coming? No one tagged the alternate reality?”

“Seems not. At least… No one said." The Doctor's voice was remarkably steady as he finally voiced what he thought it would kill him ever to say out loud.

“Can you go back and change anything?”

“Been asking myself the same question since before the regeneration. I don’t know what would happen. There’s a wall up that nothing should be able to penetrate. I could make things worse. I've gone back to Skaro a few times to try to stop it then after all. Saw me a couple of times, saw the moment I caved. There were seconds, Jack, long useful seconds in which I could have slipped in, done it right after all, and gotten out clean. Yet I never could. Coward every time." The Doctor laughed hollowly. “One time, I got so close the explosion singed my jacket.”

“Explosion?”

“After I turned tail and ran, a Dalek rolled over the live wires and blew the place up.”

“That was what you were supposed to do, wasn't it–blow the place?” Jack asked.

The Doctor nodded.

"But it made no difference to the reality of the Time War?"

"That's not… It wasn't, I should have…"

"I'm just trying to get a handle on this," the former Time Agent said softly. "I just want to understand."

"What can't you understand, Jack? I should have found a way to stop it. I should have been able to think of another solution. I should have been able to–"

The Doctor fixed his eyes on Harkness, and the young man flinched. Demons stared out at him, right through the gates of Hell. Jack Harkness forced himself not to look away, not to let the Doctor see any reaction out of him. It took all his training, all the will he could muster, and all the love he still was able to let himself feel.

"They were always yelling at me at the Academy, Jack," the Doctor said softly, "screaming with disdain and disgust…" He threw the human a fey smile. "…letting me know with the most eloquent of speeches what a cock-up I was." The Doctor's smile faltered. "It didn't stop after I stole the TARDIS and ran–they kept screaming at me. Screaming in my head, Jack, but I never listened to them, never… and the screaming… the screaming and the curses and pleas… They're screaming at me still, you know? Screaming in the silence, and I can't stop listening."

The Doctor slammed his fists into his head. Harkness jumped up to stop him, but he threw the human off. The last Time Lord circled the perimeter of the TARDIS kitchen like a caged tiger in torment and going crazy because it was better in some perversely meaningful way than going sane. Jack Harkness stayed clear of him but watched him keenly.

"Mighty Time Lord brain!" the Doctor sobbed, "Oh so clever, me! Can't you see, Jack… I should have realized what was happening and found a way to stop it when I still could. Because of my blind inadequacy, my stupid blunders, it became this unthinkable obscenity that I couldn't control and couldn't stop! And I live it over and over, Jack… over and over… every night and every day of my life, and I never save her… I never can!"

"Doc?" Jack said, feeling very uneasy, and more than a little afraid of the powerful and possibly irrational alien, "You still talking about the Time War?"

The Doctor turned and calmly returned to Harkness in that easy natural lope of his. He cocked his head. Eyes an unfathomable shade of blue looked straight into Harkness's eyes. Quietly, reasonably, and way too sanely, the Time Lord recited a litany of his sins. "I couldn’t convince them what was happening. I couldn't get enough of them to help me shore up the weaknesses that were beginning to show in the temporal fabric. I couldn't find another solution. I couldn't finish off the Daleks, and then I couldn't stop them; no matter when, they just kept coming back. I couldn't avert the war. I couldn't think of anything else to do, and like you said, systems and species that should be alive are dead or unborn because of me. Gallifrey is gone; I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save even one of them!”

The Doctor's ancient unearthly eyes paled into a conventional shade of blue, a blue that might not contain time and space, a blue that might not have seen destinies burn.

"Borusa always loved a good irony," he continued, "academically speaking, that is. The Doctor, the perpetually misbehaving Time Lord, always mucking about in the time lines, always getting involved in others' lives. They taught me, didn't they! You humans have a saying about giving a man enough rope… Academically speaking that is." He grinned at Harkness.

Jack cringed, at last seeing the Doctor's face-filling grin for all that it was.

"Some events can't be stopped. You know this, Time Lord. Perverted time lines may never be put right, lost actualities never restored. Doctor, I know you well enough to be certain you would have tested and retested every possibility. You tried everything that could have made a difference–I _know_ this!–and you couldn't put things right. You have to stop equating your failure to change cosmological fact with the atrocities that the murdering Daleks unleashed. And you're going to have to accept the Time Lords' narcissistic indifference let it happen… that and the solution they chose when they finally decided to get involved. You were a victim of the Time War, Doctor; but, for you, being even a victim is the same thing as being one of the bad guys. All that you are guilty of is caring too much, loving too much–and it’s killing you."

Jack shook his head. "I know what you are, Doctor; you are not a murderer and not just one more innocent victim. You are a champion." He decided to go for it. " _Time’s Champion_. Isn’t that one of the names they call you by in the legends?"

The Doctor scoffed. “Champion?! Look up the definition of the word, Jack Harkness. I couldn’t find a way. I was… I am worse than useless.”

The Time Lord turned to walk away, but Harkness wouldn't let him. His fists gripped the Doctor's shoulders and turned him back firmly. Eyes met eyes again.

“No one but you gave a hoot that Time was being violated and mutilated, no one cared about what was about to be obliterated from history. The only way you would have lost less was to have chosen the easy way out, though I'm pretty sure they wouldn’t have allowed it. But you fought the odds, even when they beat you down; and then you stuck around to help the survivors, to keep watch over them and protect them. There are always murderers, and always too many innocent victims. There are never enough champions, like you, putting it all on the line for the rest of your life.

“You never stopped trying to fix things for the others, not even when the Time War took everything you cared about. You are a champion Doctor, whether you like it or not, condemning yourself even if God would forgive you."

“There is no god, Jack; not like that.”

“That's why there's such anguish and guilt in people like you. You have one foot in a state of grace and one in Hell. There is no such thing as Divine forgiveness, and you can't get absolution from victims who no longer exist. Knowing you–and I do know you, Doctor, no matter how much you try to keep me at a distance–you would never accept their absolution even if there were a way to get it to you. The best you’ll ever do is the understanding and empathy of those who are left; and that’s never good enough for the likes of you, you hero-victims. But the universe still exists, and though we can't grant you absolution, we can freely and with full knowledge and understanding give you the only kind of grace that matters in a godless, cold universe: our gratitude and our love. You may not want to accept it, Doctor; but those of us who know who you are will give it freely along with our continuing faith in you. Those who don't know, like Rose, can give you not _lethe_ , but the gift of knowing the beauty your sacrifices have kept in the universe.

“You don’t see what Rose really is," Jack continued earnestly. "You think she's the universe's daily reminder of your sins, its eternally dangling carrot that you want so badly but believe you’re not good enough to have. You’re wrong. Look at her, Doc; _really_ look. Rose is the thanks the universe gave you, its way of repaying you the only way it can, for all you gave to save everyone else. You gave your family, Gallifrey, your peace of mind, your sanity, your hearts and your soul. You gave everything. You’re not a murderer, Doctor, you–"

“Shut it, Harkness, you’re talking out of your arse." The Doctor pulled back.

Jack Harkness was remarkably strong, even for a 51st century human, even feeling like crap the way he did, and he was no less stubborn and determined then Rose Tyler could be. He let the Doctor go, but he didn't let him run away.

“Shut it yourself. You couldn’t finish off the Dalek you met in the States–yeah, I know the whole story.”

The Doctor opened his mouth, but Jack didn’t let him get one word out this time.

“According to history, Time Lords don’t even exist–  
_  
SO!_

_SHUT!_

_IT!_

"You couldn’t leave a worthless conman to die, even in the spectacularly heroic manner I’d chosen. You didn’t want to take Blon back to be executed. She recognized what you are, and she tried to use it to play on your goodness and–  
_  
NO!_

_SHUT UP!_

"I pushed you to the point where anyone else would have beaten the crap out of me, because it’s the only way you’ll get my point, and if you are too egotistical to accept that you are a hero–" He blew out an exasperated breath.

”I’m not a hero, Jack,” the Doctor said quietly. He sighed. “I should have found a way.”

“You didn’t push the button that cauterized Reality, did you!"

With a scornful look, the Doctor made to leave the kitchen, but Jack refused to let him bolt that easily. His hand clenched around the alien's upper arm. “Did you, Doctor?”

The Doctor pulled out of Jack's grasp, knocking him out of the way. His elbow inadvertently connected with one of Jack's ribs. Jack saw stars. Then he saw red. He'd had it with stubborn, legendary, universe-saving assholes. He got in the Doctor’s face and yelled as loudly as he could. Let the bastard ignore him now.

“ _DID YOU?_ You poor schmuck! Can't you see that the Time Lords messed with your mind and it's destroying your soul? They made you think only you could do their dirty. When you wouldn't, they told you the future was on your head, even though blowing up the Daleks before the beginning made no difference to the future. They used your goodness, your love, your annoying inability to sit still when there was something you could do to fix things, and your even more annoying but useful tendency to feel responsible for everything. They have you convinced that you caused something that they and the Daleks are responsible for. No one else need take any responsibility and accept any of the monumental blame and ineffable guilt, because the last of the Time Lords does it so well and totally!" He scoffed. "You wear your guilt like a raven wears his feathers."

"What? What do you mean, Jack?"

"The Dalek nursery was blown up, even if you didn't do it; and it made absolutely no dif–"

"No, no, not that." The Time Lord shook his head brusquely. "Tell me about the raven."

"The- ? Oh. It's an old Earth saying."

"Earth, yes, Rose's planet. Racial memory? Could be Mills and Boone I suppose.  Jack, tell me everything you know."

Jack rubbed his aching head, confused how the argument he thought he'd just hit out of the park on a home run had gotten itself across the plate on a strike ball. "Yeah, ok. Well, the raven can represent Destruction… the unclean...the cursed–"

"The cursed…" the Doctor repeated with a low chuckle. "Figures."

"The raven appears as a symbol in almost every Earth culture. That's one. In other cultures, the raven is powerful good. It's the great mystery that hasn't formed, and the black hole in space that draws in all energy and releases it in new forms. Because the raven speaks, it's also been connected to wisdom and prophecy. The raven was the protector of Earth's Biblical prophets. The changing iridescence of its plumage was thought to represent the constant change of forms and shape that emerge from the black void. Both the Scots and the Celts of Earth have a saying: there is wisdom in a raven's head. The Irish say that to have a raven's knowledge is to have a seer's supernatural powers. The raven is also believed to be Guardian of the healing circles."

"So what does it mean, Jack, this saying of yours?"

Jack scratched at the back of his head and thought about how to put the aphorism into words that didn't sound like a slip of paper from a fortune cookie. "Think of how someone identifies himself to his world, the way he wants the world to think of him. The raven is black, but there are flecks of bright colour to him as well, colour that shows when he moves in the sunlight. The way a raven wears his feathers–he knows what he is and accepts it, he doesn't hide it or pretend to be anything false. He's not afraid to be seen for what he is and is proud of it.

"Usually it's a compliment. 'You wear your intelligence like a raven wears his feathers!' That one's obvious. Or your heart–means you're not afraid to show your love. Or your goodness, your–"

"I got it."

"In your case, it's the one who is responsible for everything that went wrong or bad, the one to blame for anything that isn't fixable, the one guilty of every–"

"Ok, Harkness! I got it."

"Don't you see! You are spending your life trying to atone for something you didn't do. And you're so consumed with guilt for not being able to stop it that you regret everything that you _HAVE_ done. And _that_ means you regret your actions that saved the Earth, the Milky Way Galaxy, the civilizations of the local supercluster including the protestors whose peaceful revolution in 3550 will change the face of the region for 500 years, the artists and philosophers of the Magellanic Clouds whose talents and genius rival da Vinci, Michelangelo, Monet, van Gogh, Picasso; and for that matter the inhabitants of the Helmi stream planets, whose planet seeding gave Earth those geniuses, as well as Shakespeare, Bach, Segovia, Bronte, Herrera."

Jack could see that the Doctor was listening to him, finally. Finally the impressive Time Lord brain was thinking things out logically. He softened his tone to let the words themselves reveal their power.

"It means you regret the Earth woman who discovers the cure for breast cancer and the students across the galaxy from her who at the same time do a science fair project that leads to inter-galactic travel, and space-faring civilizations meeting and learning each other. It means you regret my being here with you, alive. It means you regret Rose being alive and here."

The Doctor suddenly was shaking. Was Harkness right? No, he couldn’t be! After all that he'd done and not been able to do, and all that he had lost, after all the pain, it couldn’t be that simple! Could it?

And then Jack’s hand was on his shoulder.

“It’s that simple, Doctor; the enormity of what you couldn't change has been blocking you from seeing the enormity of all you have done.”

The Doctor staggered back from Harkness's touch in a panic.

“I’m not a telepath, Doc," Harkness smiled, "just very perceptive and a very astute judge of character." The Doctor looked at him sceptically. "Look, by my reckoning, we’ve already been in each other’s minds once each. We’re even. We're done. Ok?"

The Doctor stared hard at Jack Harkness. He stared hard into himself. “Not ok. By _MY_ reckoning, Harkness, I’ll owe you the rest of my life and any peace I'm lucky enough to trip over and fall into. I’ll disbelieve and backslide and be a shithead, but I’ll try to remember.”

“Maybe one day it’ll sink in?”

“D’you believe in miracles after all, then, Jack Harkness?”

“You tell me: should I?"

“Jack, don’t make me come so close to beating you again.”

“When I need to prove something–“

“Find another way.”

The renegade Time Lord and renegade Time Agent stood a moment, each taking measure of the person he faced.

“Doctor, go to her now and tell the one you are in love with how you feel about her, let her know you think rough sex is really hot and like a woman who takes charge. If I remember twenty-first century women correctly, do not show your face without chocolate, flowers and jewelry. Steer clear of chemically unstable alien-enhanced sapphires. I recommend diamonds. Big. Flawless. Left hand, fourth finger.”

"Jack, why does this matter so much to you?"

"Why?" A good question, and it stopped him cold.

Rosie was brave and smart and clever and beautiful, empathic and caring, and she was the only one who could keep the Doctor in line. Regardless of what she'd said when she was trying to apologize, Rosie really didn't know him well enough to have developed an instinctive trust for him the way she had for the Doctor. He frowned. Maybe she had the instinct not to trust him. Maybe thinking himself changed was just one more con in his back pocket. Jack shivered, his mind skittering from the thought like a sand devil in a windstorm.

"Jack?"

And the Doctor. A Time Lord. The last Time Lord. He had so much knowledge at his command, yet he could just as easily be the stupidest male ever in need of saving. The Doctor fought being saved as if stubborn masochism were his birthright. Jack couldn't find a bowl of lentil stew for the Time Lord in love. But Rosie could, Jack was sure of it.

The Doctor was a pro at screwing up his own life. In fact, if he had to say, Jack would say the Doctor was even better at that than he was. Maybe if Rose could get him to stop hating himself, the Doctor wouldn't be getting into so much trouble all the time. Then he wouldn't have to worry so much about those two when he was gone.

They had gotten to him, those two. Mismatched on paper, perfectly matched every way else–they were good together. They'd been good for him. They were essential for the good of everyone who'd ever live, yeah, Jack knew it in his gut.

"No reason, Doc. Except you and Rosie are good together. And you need her to keep you from becoming a permanent piece of _avant garde_ sculpture on the wall of some madman's prison."

"Hmmm." The Doctor fixed Harkness with a piercing stare. "Wouldn't ever take you for Dear Abby, Jack Harkness."

“Shut it and get going before I decide to toss you out the airlock. I’ll work on the trans-spatial braking interface.” Jack grinned. "Maybe while you’re making love to the one of your women, I’ll make love to the other.”

“Harkness!”

As soon as the Doctor was gone, Jack Harkness fell back heavily into the chair and buried his head in his hands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
**~~~**

 

DARK RETROSPECT concludes in part 3, ["This Is Who I Am; Right Here, Right Now"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1136128)

 

* * *

 

 

 

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.  
  
This story archived at <http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=52602>

 

 

 


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